In another episode we listen to project updates from day two of the CloudFest Hackathon, Ekaterina Streltsova joined us live to share the WEB Responsibility Scanner—an innovative open source tool designed to make the web more sustainable and accessible.
She explains about the often overlooked impact of CO₂ emissions from web pages and highlights the staggering number of people excluded by inaccessible websites. Ekaterina also adds why tackling these issues is more vital than ever, especially with new regulations like the European Accessibility Act, and learn how their team is bridging the gap with practical, affordable solutions for everyone.
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Takeaways
Web Sustainability Has Environmental Impact: Every web page load consumes energy and contributes to CO2 emissions; for example, a web page with 10,000 monthly views can generate over 200 kg of CO2 per year due to unoptimized code and unused CSS, highlighting the importance of sustainable web development 01:29.
Digital Accessibility Affects 1.3 Billion People: Accessibility barriers such as poor color contrast, missing image descriptions, and inadequate keyboard navigation can exclude one in six people globally from accessing the digital world, emphasizing that accessibility is not a niche concern but a widespread issue 02:29.
Legal Requirements in the EU: The European Accessibility Act, which took effect in June of the previous year, makes it legally mandatory for businesses in the EU to comply with accessibility standards, making practical compliance tools essential 03:11.
Existing Tools Have Gaps: Most current tools for checking web sustainability and accessibility are either not open source or are expensive, which excludes many potential users from accessing these resources and hinders widespread adoption 03:40.
The WEB Responsibility Scanner Solution: The team is creating an open-source, all-in-one tool that provides both sustainability and accessibility analysis for any web page via a simple URL input, helping users comply with regulations and demonstrate their commitment to these issues to stakeholders 04:02.
You can learn more about the project here on the Hackathon’s site.
Episode Transcript
Ekaterina Streltsova:
Hello everyone, my name is Ekaterina, I’m head of design and these days at CloudFest Hackathon we are building WEB Responsibility Scanner. It is an all in one web sustainability and accessibility tool that helps designers, developers, web owners, accessibility consultants analyze, fix the issue and demonstrate the impact in two of the most underestimated areas on web development. And let me explain you why those two areas are even more important than most people realize. Every time someone loads a web page, data flows through servers, data centers and cables that generates CO2 because it requires a lot of energy. So an average web Page generates around 1.76 CO2 per simple view. That can sound like a really low number. Until we calculate and analyze web page with at least like 10,000 views monthly can generate over 200 kg of CO2 per year. This number is really huge and it comes from unoptimized code, unused CSS and other issues that product owners and web owners don’t even realize about the impact that it has on the environment.
And then there is accessibility. 1.3 billion people around the world live with some sort of disability, which means that they can suffer from low color contrast, lack of descriptions for images and video captions, and what’s even more important, keyboard navigation. It also means that one in six people can get unfortunately excluded from the digital world every single day. This is a very important issue that we are also solving. Those are not the edge cases. Those are people who are unfortunately excluded from the digital world every single day. And it is not only about moral argument.
Last year in June the European Accessibility act came into force which meant that companies and businesses operating in European Union now are legally required to follow those standards. So the requirements are clear. But what has been missing nowadays is a simple and practical way to actually comply with those. And there are tools, separate tools nowadays to check accessibility and the sustainability for the web pages, but unfortunately most of those are not open sourced and sometimes even pricey, which means that not everyone can afford them those and this is the gap that we want to fill in our project.
So we are building an open source solution introducing the simple URL and you get the analysis of your web page sustainability and accessibility wise. It is open sourced and it works for any web page because we understand how important is to be compliant and also to share your insights improvements with your stakeholders, clients and with other users in order to demonstrate that sustainability and accessibility is actually important for you. So that’s what we are building. Thank you.
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