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In our latest Tech Forum session, Escape from the Forbidden Zone: Smuggling green and inclusive tech past the gatekeepers, James Christie talked about today’s business climate and its effects on the implementation of sustainable, inclusive practices. Below are the five key takeaways on how he suggests we might reframe principles in business-friendly language, tweak processes for stealth impact, and adopt passive resistance tactics.

Takeaway 1 — The internet’s carbon footprint

As a whole, the internet has a big footprint, with roughly 4% of all global electricity going to powering it. This equates to tons of CO2 a year — roughly the same as the output of the aviation industry — and those emissions are set to double by 2030. The recent uptick of AI has been significantly contributing to this growth making it impossible to ignore. One example of the outsized impact of AI can be seen in Ireland, where a quarter of the country’s electricity now goes to power data centres.

Takeaway 2 — What designers can do

Web design can play an important role in the overall internet carbon footprint. Since 2010, webpages went from being below 500 KB to 3 MB. The faster the internet gets, the more that is demanded of it. This essentially means that we're filling up all our new bandwidth as fast as it can be created.

The average weight of a modern day webpage is 1.5 MB of which JavaScript makes up at least 30%. Most of this size can be attributed to commercial technologies that don't serve the user and end up costing both the user and the environment.

So the question is, what can designers do to minimize this?

A good place to start is Ecograder. This free tool is designed to help its users prioritize specific actions they can take to reduce website carbon emissions. It evaluates websites, provides an analysis of web content, and calculates the carbon impact.

These reports often note a positive correlation between the amount of data and CO2.

Hence, the next question to consider is how can one reduce data? This is where the aesthetic aspects of web design come into play. By adopting data-aware design practices, web developers can create websites that are not only user-friendly but also environmentally responsible, reducing the digital carbon footprint.

Takeaway 3 — Web design and web performance

The Web Sustainability Guidelines are a great place to start when tackling your web design. The three primary steps to meet these guidelines are accessibility, web performance, and applying best practices. Despite these being clearly stated, 95% of sites still fail to meet these standards, with over 50 errors per page.

Some of the most common issues to look out for include:

Low contrast text
Missing ALT text
Form labels
Vague or misleading link text

An easy way to catch these is by using an accessibility evaluation plugin.

The next thing to consider is web performance. This means answering the question: How fast can one get the website to load as a site owner? Some standard sustainable approaches such as reducing downloadable documents, avoiding PDFs, following sustainability guidelines for image assets, maintaining proper documentation etc., line up perfectly with web optimization techniques. This saves both money and carbon.

Looking out for sustainable hosting providers can also make a huge difference. Doing this not only increases sustainability based on the provided guidelines but also ends up being very useful in the long run for maintenance purposes.

Takeaway 4 — Reframing terminology and disguising your sustainability

Given some of the current political shifts, sustainability and climate change have taken a little bit of a backseat. With some major companies denouncing their promises and commitment to sustainability, the challenge has expanded into a more tricky area. Now, convincing stakeholders or management to continue improving on sustainability tactfully is essential to continue remaining sustainable. One way in which James suggests this can be done is by disguising the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) and reframing the terminology to reposition the narrative while still accomplishing the necessary results.

Some subtle shifts in language he suggests are:

Inclusive design = Usability
Inclusion = Market share
Accessibility = Search engine optimization
Sustainability = Efficiency
Alt tags, image description tags = Search engine optimization
Assistive technology = Connecting with younger demographic
Green hosting = Resilience

While the means to continue fighting to protect the environment might have changed, James provides meaningful and effective methods to continue the fight. Even in the face of the challenges that might seem outside of one’s control.

Takeaway 5 ––There is hope

Despite the recent challenges, it's also important to remember that there's hope. And that at the heart of it all, most people continue to care. While some companies may have denounced their sustainability practices, most of North America remains committed to thinking about about sustainability. A Workiva study has found that 85% of companies are continuing climate disclosures despite political shifts.

Furthermore, our own government mentions digital sustainability as a policy goal, as part of the Digital Nations Initiative.

So while certain challenges may have arisen, there are always workarounds and solutions as long as the individual commitment to protect the environment remains intact.

If you’d like to watch the whole webinar, or read the presentation slides, you can find those here: Escape from the Forbidden Zone: Smuggling green and inclusive tech past the gatekeepers.

And if you’re wondering where to start with some of the above advice, why not start with image descriptions? Even though this work can often be daunting when you’re faced with different situations, our past presenter Leah Brochu, breaks down how to approach even the most complex of images in her sessions: The details of description: Techniques, tips, and tangents on alternative text and Details of description part II: Describing images in practice. Watch them or read the transcript for guidelines, techniques, and examples for writing image descriptions as well as information on how to use AI as a contributor.

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