Accessible is Performant
summary
An accessibility audit uses VoiceOver, Firefox’s accessibility inspector and Lighthouse and finds the accessibility tree choking on Google's Material radio inputs: six HTML elements, 66 CSS selectors, 2,374 lines of JS and repeated VoiceOver crashes. Replacing that pattern yields 50% reduction in HTML elements, a DOM depth cut by a third, 90% smaller CSS payload, and 30k less JavaScript served — VoiceOver stops crashing. Lighthouse guidance (DOM <1500, depth ≤32) and Marco’s Firefox patches (10–20% call speedups) back the claim.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Accessible performance intro
- 2:26Accessibility tree
- 9:12Accessible UI components
- 15:55Semantic HTML reduces complexity
- 18:23Material Design performance cost
- 22:16Assistive tech matters
- 26:57Slow machines impact
- 33:45Performance beyond speed
- 36:34Cognitive load reduction
- 40:063 ways to improve accessibility
- 43:00Q&A
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