Accessibility and Performance - Marcy Sutton Todd - performance.now() 2025

What if performance meant more than speed – what if it included how intuitively and equitably people can interact with your website? This session takes a practical look at how designing for accessibility contributes to more responsive, usable experiences, especially for disabled users. We’ll explore how access patterns across devices, locales, and input methods influence perceived responsiveness, and why subtle choices — like how content loads or which elements receive focus — can have outsized effects on usability. We’ll look at tangible ways to measure your interfaces beyond load speed — like how long it takes assistive tech to surface meaningful content, or how much effort it takes for someone to complete a task. Along the way, we’ll talk about design and engineering strategies, legal context in Europe, and the satisfaction of building digital products and services that genuinely work better for more people. If you care about impact, and you're curious how accessibility efforts intersect with web performance, join me. You might leave with a few new metrics — and a fresh sense of purpose. Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/... *** A session from performance.now(), the web performance conference. Each November in Amsterdam; see https://perfnow.nl for more information. Conference announcements in your inbox? https://perfnow.nl/subscribe