Web Accessibility and Reduced Resource Utilization
Written on October 14, 2011
This blog post is part of a series of posts discussing the Business Case for Accessibility. In order to get a full view of the Business Case for Accessibility, I encourage you to read all posts in this series, links to which can be found at the bottom of this post.
Some argue that relying on more standards-based production techniques will save money by reducing resource utilization – particularly bandwidth. They state that doing things like using CSS instead of tables and spacer images, and eliminating “tag soup”-riddled markup will cause a decrease in hardware-related resources needed for a website due to reduced document weight.
- Does it increase income? No. Reduced resource utilization is about saving money
- Does save money? Probably not significantly, as I’ll discuss below
- Does it mitigate risk? No.
- How strong is the evidence? Weak. I have seen no recent evidence to suggest that document size has a significant impact on a company’s bandwidth or hosting bill.
It seems to make sense: Use less of something and that thing will cost less money. The thing is that these days bandwidth and server space is pretty cheap. When it comes to very large companies, their [...]