Re: New site

I know this is all off-topic, but I thought I'd throw in my two cents. For
starters, a quick look at those links and you see that the dates average 4
to 6 years old... or they're talking about the Australian Outback.

The fact is, in 2002 the Internet has grown to many orders of magnitude
since the Lynx text browser days and when many people surfed with images
off. Further, as broadband becomes more and more prevalent, fewer and fewer
will surf the net this way. Already, the majority of people on the Web buy
their machines with whatever OS is installed and tend to not even know how
to change color depth or resolution much less turn browser images off. The
thought is silly at best.

Anyone here who owns or works for a commercial ISP would laugh at the idea
that people would surf the Web or know how to surf the Web with images off.
Heck, just look at the prevalence of AOL users to start with.

With no data to back me up and not counting people with accessibility
issues, I would guess that less than 1% of people in the US surf with images
off in 2002. 75% of them are using Windows and whatever MSIE version that
came with their machine and most of those are still using the factory
setting for color depth and resolution. This guess might be based on any of
our server logs, if we look at environmental variables.

I, personally wouldn't be willing to let a client degrade a Website one drop
if it meant them losing one sale to the 99% of the visitors in order to
accommodate accessibility issues... and certainly wouldn't take into account
image-off users unless it means meeting W3C standards, which we try to do.
... just my opinion.

Craig T. Harding MS
Association of Computing Machinery - ACM
Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers - IEEE
President - GuideNet.Net
(all outbound email scanned by Norton 2002)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Livsey" <mlivsey(at)qwest.com>
To: <hwg-critique(at)hwg.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2002 3:36 PM
Subject: Re: New site


> I agree with everyone that the numbers of those that surf without viewing
> graphics are high. None of the sites that state this say where they got
the
> info. Who knows, maybe someone made it up a few years ago by looking at
the
> behaviors of their friends and then it became the standard statistic. Here
are
> some sites that state this statistic. After taking a look at these sites,
I
> still don't believe that stat. I mentioned I had found around twenty, but
half
> of them just have the same article as the others.
>
> So take this info for what it's worth, which isn't much at all.
>
> http://www.joeclark.org/wwwaccess.html
>
http://www.msdirect.com/direct_marketing_resources/move_over_mensa___a_websi
te_iq/website_iq.html
>
> http://www.abc.net.au/pm/s297257.htm
> http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/talkback/talkback_18135.html
> http://www.iia.net.au/question.html
> http://www.fgx.cc/core/newsletter_details.asp?ArticleID=12
> http://www.pawluk.com/pages/mktg/marketing_banners.html
> http://www.o-a.com/archive/1997/December/0108.html
> http://www.o-a.com/archive/1996/August/0215.html
>
> Mike Livsey
>
>
>
>
> Michael Heliker wrote:
>
> > If these statistics are true... that would affect my work significantly.
I
> > would really love to get my hands on these sources!!
> >
> > could you send me some of those sites that claim this?
> >
> > tia,
> >
> > Michael
> >
> > > ----------
> > >
> > > Here is what I have found. Does anyone have other info about this?
> > >
> > > There seems to be a lot of websites (I have found over 20) that
> > > specifically state 20-30 percent of internet users have graphics
turned off
> > for
> > > different reasons. None of these sites, however,  state where they
found
> > that
> > > statistic. I would be interested in knowing if someone researched this
and
> > in what year they did so.
> > >
> > > Here are a list of reasons why people might view the internet without
> > > graphics which may account for the 20-30 percent statistic.
> > >
> > > * The user may want to view pages faster, they are using a 28k or 56k
> > > modem, they are in a rural area and get 14k download speeds. Or maybe
for
> > some reason  they are on a plan where they are paying for each
individual
> > call.
> > >
> > > * They are using a text based browser. They do this for accessibility
> > > reasons, they are on a Unix or Linux box and haven't found a graphical
> > browser they like.
> > >
> > > * They are using a speech browser, brail reader or any other
alternative
> > browser.
> > >
> > > Mike Livsey
> > >
> > >
> > >
>
>

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