{"id":8587,"date":"2019-04-25T14:00:45","date_gmt":"2019-04-25T12:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rnw.media\/?post_type=news&p=8587"},"modified":"2019-04-25T14:00:45","modified_gmt":"2019-04-25T12:00:45","slug":"access-for-all-better-tech-is-inclusive-tech","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/www.rnw.media\/index.php\/news\/access-for-all-better-tech-is-inclusive-tech\/","title":{"rendered":"Access for all \u2013 better tech is inclusive tech\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Engaging young people via digital media channels is the bedrock of RNW Media\u2019s work \u2013 but we are active in some of the most difficult countries in the world when it comes to internet access. Yemen, for instance, has the slowest internet in the world and, along with other countries where we work, ranks poorly in the UN’s global poverty index – meaning internet connectivity may be unaffordable. RNW Media\u2019s developers are pioneering new ways to tackle these challenges and make our technology as inclusive as possible.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Andrew Killen has been leading RNW Media\u2019s efforts to optimise the Citizen\u2019s Voice websites, making them amongst the fastest in the world to access via mobile phone. But the work he and his colleagues in the digital team are doing isn\u2019t just about speed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the efficiency that\u2019s important – and thinking about our audience. The average kid in Rwanda has 80 cents a month to spend on internet access so we better use that money wisely. Our users are about 90 % mobile. Maybe they\u2019re in internet cafes. Maybe they\u2019re in the middle of a conflict zone. They rely on their mobile phone to get all their information. And they don\u2019t have a lot of money. So the sites they visit had better be quick, better be efficient, better be small, better give them all the information they need straight away.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The key to increasing the speed and efficiency of the websites is reducing the amount of information that needs to be transferred between the server and mobile phone before the site can be loaded.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t see it, but when you click on a site, your phone downloads the HTML code and in that code are a bunch of things the phone needs to use to build the webpage. And your phone will ask the server questions -hey, can I have this image please, and that image will come back to your phone. It reads a bit more code and again asks hey – can I have this please and that process keeps on going till the site is loaded. An average e-commerce site would have 200 of those questions and a simple Dutch site like a blog might have 50-70 of those questions. We bring our codes down to under 24 questions\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n

The key to the process is combining requests and removing any data that isn\u2019t absolutely necessary. An image, for instance, may contain what\u2019s known as Exif data – information that\u2019s added to a photo such as what type of camera or phone it was taken with, what was the light, the colour, the focal length. It\u2019s all information that has absolutely no value to whoever\u2019s actually looking at that image – but it will slow things down. Another process that helps reduce the amount of information needed to load a site is \u2018Naming\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen it comes to HTML code, every character counts \u2013 instead of using the word \u2018white\u2019 to describe a background colour, we use #fff, it means exactly the same thing but it\u2019s a character smaller, just as \u2018black\u2019 is longer than #000. We try and use all these little capabilities to reduce something that\u2019s very big into something that\u2019s much smaller and more condensed.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The result of this painstaking attention to detail is that a page on a Citizens\u2019 Voice website is an average of 140 kilobytes \u2013 compared, for instance, to the home page of one of Burundi\u2019s major newspapers which weighs in at 3.5 megabytes. And that translates into a significant increase in efficiency – especially for disadvantaged users:<\/p>\n

\u201cWith an old 3g phone in an area with poor internet you\u2019ll see the first elements on screen on one of our sites in 7\/10ths of a second, 700 milliseconds, and the whole page will load within 2.3 seconds. This feels very much as if you\u2019re on a desktop with a good connection. If you were to try loading a page from that newspaper we talked about, it would take 7 seconds before you saw even the first elements and 23 seconds to complete. \u2018<\/em><\/p>\n

Seven seconds might not seem like a long time to wait, but time feels different when you\u2019re online, says Killen.<\/p>\n

“It\u2019s to do with wondering if it\u2019s working, I\u2019ve clicked it \u2013 nothing\u2019s happening, is the website broken? Is my phone broken? Is the internet broken\u2019? It\u2019s that fear factor that comes in and we can completely strip that away with what\u2019s like an instant response.”<\/em><\/p>\n

To get a feeling of how fast our Yaga Burundi site is for our target audience, check out how quickly it loads using the free Wi-Fi available on Dutch trains – a notoriously slow network.<\/p>\n