Global Reproductive Health IT Support list

["Tor de Vries" <TDevries AT engenderhealth.org>]

Jojo...

 

I have some experience designing web pages for low-bandwidth audiences, though honestly 256 kbps doesn't sound like low bandwidth.  Maybe 14.4 kbps -- that's low bandwidth.

 

If your target audience has download access at 256 kbps, and if my mental calculator is working properly, then they have a peak download capacity of roughly 30kb (file size) per second.  For optimal usability, you would keep your page load to under 2 seconds, so we're talking 60kb of data.  If you reuse external CSS, images, and _javascript_ files across your web pages, these will [almost certainly] be cached in your visitor's browser, so you could put more data in those files.  E.g. a web page's total data footprint might be 100kb (HTML + CSS + images + scripting) but if 60kb are external files shared across all the pages, then subsequent visits to the site will only incur the 40kb non-cached portion (HTML) of the page.  Reusability is a good idea, anyway, but it also offers speed benefits.

 

(Totally aside: I can't remember if kilobit is "kb" and kilobyte is "Kb" or "KB" or "kB".......)

 

Anyway, if you use Firefox, and you are a web developer, I recommend the Firebug extension (http://www.getfirebug.com/) for debugging web sites.  Yahoo's developer team recently released YSlow (http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/) which is a free Firebug plug-in that analyzes the speed and cacheability of your web pages (though I would take their advice on acceleration with a large grain of salt).  However, installing Firebug and YSlow may slightly reduce the speed of your web browser (since it captures and analyzes the web page as it loads).

 

Hope that helps.

 

 

 

Regards,

Tor

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From: grhits-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:grhits-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Jojo Almario
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2007 4:27 PM
To: grhits AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [grhits] Web apps/site accesibility

 

This questions is for the web app/page developers and/or designers out there who have experience designing apps/sites accessible by third world countries.

 

I realize they may be much more to consider than what I am about to list but I need to start somewhere.  Anywhere here is the question….

 

Considering the use of CSS, regular graphics, text, floating or background graphics, what would the optimum size be for each.  To put this another way what size limit would make the those resources, easily accessible? Just accessible? Barely accessible?  Lets also say that our target audience are workers in Kenya most of whom have a connection roughly averaging 256kdown/128up.

 

I know this question may be very unclear and depend on a lot of factors, but I may also need to hear some of those “depends on..” type answers as they will help me go in the direction I need to go.

Feel free to ask for more clarification,

 

Jojo Almario

Intrahealth International inc.