Accessibility / Energy-based design principles

[WalterRobin]

As the Atlas can grow bigger and bigger we need to have design / contribution standards that maintain maximum accessibility regarding its digital tools:

• website (not including visualising tools)
• media (videos, pictures, sounds)
• hosting solutions (website+media)

We can agree as maximum accessibility as a standard following these proposed criteria:

• physical accessibility: readibility, color blindness, possible transcript
• network accessibility: low/medium bandwidth/signal
• material accessibility: low computational power
• energy accessibilty: low energy demand

The implications:

• inclusive interface design
• reducing overall weight of the digital tools and media (All content of english Wikipedia is only 9GB)
• contribution constraints
• design and aesthethics constraints
• coding constraints / CMS choice

The advantages of doing that:

• reducing overall hosting costs (increasing gain as the atlas gets bigger)
• significant speed/loading gains (also meaning better natural search optimization)
• increased durability of deployed tools
• researching new practices for digital atlas design
• exemplary posture compared to the energy escalation proposed by mainstream digital industry
• the lighter the website the better the visualisation tools' speed

[clemsos]

Interesting take. Right now we are pretty minimum as the website is jekyll builds of html pages.

How will you get started on this ?

[WalterRobin]

I'm trying to apply those principles to my website to test them. I'll gather everything in a guide when I'm done with my website. I'm keeping you in touch soon!

[clemsos]

Great! Looking forward hearing more.

How do you estimate consumption of a website currently? Is there an existing formula?

[WalterRobin]

There are several modelisations but hard to get because it's copyrighted. I'm still looking at it but there is a common principle: the lighter it is, the less it consumes!