Better performance === greater accessibility
summary
Argues that faster pages are more accessible and proves it by rebuilding the 10K Apart site to ship a usable, accessible page under ten kilobytes at initial load that works without JavaScript and supports screen readers and keyboard nav. Uses progressive enhancement, avoids libraries (one tiny Modernizr SVG probe), runs a gulp pipeline to minify and precompress assets (gzip and Brotli), uses resource hints (dns-prefetch, preconnect, preload), Varnish caching, conditional comments, and lazy‑loaded pictures with WebP fallbacks; images shrink from ~38KB to ~4KB and the site meets its rules and performs.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (16)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:18Better performance === greater accessibility
- 4:12Poor performance is friction
- 4:41A 1s delay in page load can reduce conversions by 7%
- 6:12Performance matters
- 13:27Use native features whenever possible
- 18:14If you need a custom font: subset, subset, subset
- 19:46Only include assets you actually need
- 22:00Chances are, your library of choice is on a CDN
- 35:19Think about when you load assets
- 39:24HTTP/2 creates a single connection and contents stream in
- 42:08Consider how you load assets
- 50:00Only load assets when they add value
- 51:57If you can avoid using an image, do it
- 56:59Oh wait... optimize everything
- 58:41Not every browser supports WebP
