The Critical Web Design Toolkit (CWDT) aims to bring awareness to the environmental impact that websites have, while also highlighting accessibility practices in web design. It exists both as a tool and a contribution to ongoing conversations about the social and ethical implications of web development tools and current practices. This page contains information and resources that have been considered and used throughout the development process.

Environmental Sustainability

Although it may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of carbon emissions, the internet and the servers required to host it are considerable consumers of energy and, as a result, contribute significantly to CO2 emissions.1 In an effort to reduce the environmental impact of digital scholarship, the CWDT is a static website template for digital scholarship projects with sustainability in mind.

There are two types of websites: static and dynamic. We chose to make a static site template, because unlike dynamic sites, which must be re-generated from a database every time you open them, static sites only need to be built once and then stored on a server. Because static sites don’t have to be rebuilt every time they are opened, they are more energy efficient. This site and any other sites built using the CWDT are static sites.

While it is challenging to quantify exactly how much energy is saved using static sites rather than dynamic ones, the Website Carbon Calculator can estimate how many grams of CO2 is released each time someone loads a given website. This tool helped us to make decisions about the design of our website that would reduce its carbon footprint.

One way we did this was by using image compression and dithering to reduce the size of every image on our site, which increases the site’s speed and reduces emissions. To learn more about image compression, check out this Pixeled Eggs blog post by Sepas Seraj.

Internet Access and Accessibility

In order to ensure maximum website accessibility, we focused on both the digital divide and general website accessibility for those with disabilities. With most websites, it is easy to achieve a highly accessible user experience and should always be integrated into the development process.

One roadblock to internet access is download times and loading speeds.2 Given that static sites are generally lightweight and only need to be loaded once, the CWDT template is not only more sustainable, but also more accessible on lower internet bandwidths.

According to an article by Pablo Stanley for UX Collective, there are over 56 million people in the United States (nearly 1 in 5) and over 1 billion people worldwide who have a disability.3 To ensure ease of navigation and site clarity for those with disabilities, we conducted site accessibility tests using the WAVE Accessibility Evaluation Tool. This free program tests accessibility for tab navigation, headers, color contrasts, alt text for screen readers, and general clarity.

To learn more about website accessibility, check out this resource called Designing for accessibility is not that hard by Pablo Stanley.

Further resources:

Notes

  1. Low-Tech Magazine: Why we need a speed limit for the internet ↩

  2. Whose Knowledge? Decolonizing the Internet conference proceedings ↩

  3. Pablo Stanley, Designing for Accessibility is not that hard (UX Collective, 2018) ↩