[LINK] RFI: Usability of Telstra ADSL Service Page

[Tom Worthington]

  At 06:52 PM 11/20/2004, Frank O'Connor wrote:
>... Given that newspaper pages (Age, news. news.com.au etc) and complex 
>pages on most Australian sites with relatively large pipes load in less 
>than a second ...

The Sydney Morning Herald changed over to a reasonably efficient CSS based 
web design in early 2004 <http://www.tomw.net.au/2004/wd/design.html#layout>.

>At 5:01 PM +1100 20/11/04, Roger Clarke wrote:
>>I'm preparing my latest letter to the TIO in relation to a complaint I 
>>made a while back about Telstra's technical support durng ADSL outages.
>>
>>... Service Status WebPage, at: 
>>http://www.bigpond.com/help/servicestatus/adsl/current/default.asp ...
>>... is the page small enough to be usable over dial-up links. ...

I ran a Netmechanic report <http://r.netmechanic.com> (Sunday, Nov 21, 
21:15 EDT), with some excerpts below.

The page size too large (89kbytes) for downloading in a reasonable time on 
a dial up link. The page displays 4kbytes of text, which is only 4% of the 
total data downloaded. Graphics make up 55% of the downloaded material and 
formatting the remainder. Reducing the graphics and formatting 
(particularly the complex CSS), should allow the page to download with an 
acceptable time.

The page graphics are decorative (not providing useful information) and 
could be discarded to make the page easier to read as well as faster to 
load. The page failed an automated accessibility test 
<http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/bobbyServlet?URL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bigpond.com%2Fhelp%2Fservicestatus%2Fadsl%2Fcurrent%2Fdefault.asp&output=Submit&gl=wcag1-aaa&test=>.

---

Total Page Size: 89469 bytes
Total Graphics: 49756 bytes - 25 images
...

Load Time by Connection Speed
14.4Kbps        55.70 seconds
28.8Kbps        30.85 seconds
56Kbps           18.65 seconds
...

Page Objects
Size    Object Type     URL
39610   IMG 
http://www.bigpond.com/help/servicestatus/adsl/current/images/px_trans.gif
33871   HTML 
http://www.bigpond.com/help/servicestatus/adsl/current/default.asp
2902    CSS 
http://www.bigpond.com/res/themes/moonlight_shadow/css/style3.css
2692    CSS     http://www.bigpond.com/res/css/newlook.css
1637    IMG 
http://www.bigpond.com/res/images/newlook/bigpond_logo_noline.gif
...

HTML Problems
Line    Object  Missing
150     TABLE   WIDTH
228     IMG:/res/images/headfoot/icn_print.gif  HEIGHT
228     IMG:/res/images/headfoot/icn_print.gif  WIDTH
254     TABLE   WIDTH
...




Tom Worthington FACS     tom.worthington at tomw.net.au  Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd             ABN: 17 088 714 309
http://www.tomw.net.au            PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617
Visiting Fellow, Computer Science,  Australian National University
Publications Director,  Australian Computer Society