Website Development

From the Open & Closed Project’s homepage (Note: a few of these links do not find a valid page yet):

The Open & Closed Project is a research project headquartered in Toronto. Our main goal is to write a set of standards for the four fields of accessible media – captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. We’ll develop those standards through research and evidence-gathering. Where research or evidence is missing on a certain topic, we’ll carry it out ourselves.

We’ll test the finished standards for a year in the real world and publish them. (You’ll be able to download them for free or buy them in several formats.) Then we’ll develop training and certification programs for practitioners. It will finally be possible to become a certified captioner (or audio describer or subtitler or dubbing artist).

We’ll also develop and test improved fonts for captioning and subtitling (already underway). We’ll develop a universal file format.

This is a huge undertaking and apparently has been in the works for 4 years already. I applaud the effort and hope that this will also help snowball the increased attention to accessibility in web development.

I’m going to see if my company, The Karcher Group, Inc. will consider helping fund the project as well. It seems only right to do so for such a worthy cause and I encourage you to do so as well. For now, I’ll include his banner ad for support.

Hard to believe, in the 9 years I’ve been involved in web development, I have always been aware of an “8 second rule” - that being the maximum time a web page should take to download. Knowing that typically forced me to optimize my images and page code (tabled, sadly) to the degree^N. With broadband access slowly creeping up to becoming the lowest common denominator as far as internet access goes, I thought I could at least relax a little bit, but then comes along this study. If you do the math, it’s probably a wash based on access speeds and new programming technologies used to enhance user-experience.

Below is the meat of the study findings, but you can read the full press release on the Akamai Technologies Inc. website.

Consumers will not wait more than 4 seconds for a web page to download says a new survey conducted by JupiterResearch for Akamai Technologies Inc. Speed of downloading is most important to those with the longest online experience and highest spending, the study says.

The study says more than one-third of shoppers with a poor experience abandoned the site entirely, while 75% were likely not to shop on that site again. In addition, nearly 30% of dissatisfied customers will either develop a negative perception of the company or tell their friends and family about the experience, Jupiter says.

The report says poor site performance ranks behind only high prices and shipping costs as leading factors for dissatisfaction among online shoppers.

The study was based on a survey of 1,058 online shoppers during the first half of 2006.

Other finds include:

• Half of online shoppers with two or more years tenure shopping online or who spend more than $1,500 annually identify page loading time as a top priority for online sites.
• 46% of online shoppers insist on rapid checkout, with 55% of shoppers who spend $1,500 or more demanding the same.

Well, I guess there’s always a reason to keep your nose to the grindstone! Happy coding everyone and go get that money.