Percentage of people with CSS and/or JS disabled?

Hey everyone.

I’m working on making a news rotator using jQuery for my company webpage. Besides w3schools, is there any website that provides a large sampling of analytics which shows which percentage of browsers have CSS disabled? I’d also like to know which has JavaScript disabled, as well.

The reason I think this is going to be important is with the design of my control. If almost no one has this stuff disabled then I’ll take the approach I see all over the web (by using images, unordered lists, etc.)… but if JavaScript is disabled then my page would only have a list of large images… and I don’t want that.

I figured the safest approach would be to use a series of nested DIVs so if CSS and JS are disabled, the page still looks alright.

   <div id="newsrotator">
       <div class="newsitem">
            <div class="caption">
                <h3>Company: Renewal</h3>
                <p>Company recently established a Internal Research & Development team to explore new avenues of business.</p>
            </div>
        </div>
        <div class="newsitem">
            <div class="caption">
                <h3>Company needs you!</h3>
                <p>Company is currently seeking some _______________ and ______________ to join our talented team of _______________.  Could it be you?</p>
            </div>
        </div>
        <div class="newsitem">
            <div class="caption">
                <h3>There's a shark!</h3>
                <p>Just looking for a stock image and text to throw in the rotator for testing.</p>
            </div>
        </div>
   </div>

Not being a JavaScript/jQuery ninja (yet) I’m not sure how feasible this approach is going to be. I guess the big question is… is it worth the trouble to go this approach or should I just use a tut someone else already did and use ULs and IMGs to get the job done?

2.06 percent of users in the US have JS disabled according to YDN (Yahoo Developer Network). And just over one percent in most other countries. Most of that two percent in the US and one in other countries will never see your page anyway.

I am not sure on the CSS percentages but I’d expect them to be even lower, possibly under one percent (?).

Hope this helps!

This is article which goes with the yahoo statistics.

How many users have JavaScript disabled? · YDN Blog

I find it a hard to believe the statistic. I cannot but believe the logic is flawed in some way. The first paragraph of the first comment by Ben Ward is interesting suggesting low connection speeds mean the javascript that comes down and registers it as a javascript enabled site might not have happened before the user moves on to another page. Ben thinks, for some reason, this would inflate the number whereas I think it will decrease it.

What do you find hard to believe about it? Do you think it is too high, or too low?

I can’t see any reason to disagree with it. I know a handful of techie types who sometimes/always turn JavaScript off, but even among the clueful that’s rare. In the world of Joe Average, it’s unheard of. The vast majority of web surfers out there use their browser out of the box. They’re unlikely to change even the fonts or colours, let alone more complicated options like disabling scripts.

My only question with it is how accurately it record Firefoxists running NoScript, on the basis that NoScript has yahoo.com in the preset whitelist, so unless someone is running NoScript and removes yahoo.com from the whitelist, they will appear to Yahoo! to be using Javascript.

It would be interesting to see aggregated statistics for all users including mobile devices. Not that mobile devices are likely to skew the figures all that much in the developed world, given that they can increasingly run Javascript with no problems!

My own feeling was that it was way too high. As you said in your first paragraph

I know a handful of techie types who sometimes/always turn JavaScript off, but even among the clueful that’s rare. In the world of Joe Average, it’s unheard of.

What the statistic is saying is that 2 in every 100 visits to the site are from a browser with javascript switched off or without javascript. It just sounds like a large percentage to me.

I know webcrawler will not be javascript enabled but these are surely discounted from the statistics. I don’t know of a browser, in common use, which does not have javascript capability. I am not that clued up on the mobile market but I imagine the same statement is true there.

So where are these 2 out 100 people coming from?

Javascript capabilities are much lower in the mobile market. Yes, the current crop of smartphones are all-singing all-dancing, but a lot of older phones don’t have it.

As to where those 2% are coming from, I would guess that it includes a lot of corporate networks that may disable some/all Javascript as a security measure. While this is rarer than it used to be, it does still happen in some places. And then you’ve probably got assistive technology there as well, for people with various accessibility requirements - some of these packages don’t run Javascript.

2% is the lowest figure for that which I have ever seen.

Most sources I have come across suggest figures between 5 and 10% (athough with more and more mobile devices now supporting JavaScript it is probably lower now than it used to be.

The exact figure isn’t so important though since all that matters is that:

  1. the percentage is high enough to be significant and
  2. there have been court cases in the past where sites have been sued for not providing a way to use their site by people without JavaScript which has ended up costing the site a lot of money

A percentage of those without JavaScript are disabled and in many countries you would breach various laws relating to the disabled if your site doesn’t work without JavaScript.

I really don’t get why its the developers fault that there is no money in creating a tool to provide JavaScript accessibility to the disabled. Its really mind boggling. If it were important enough there would be a solution to it, but that thing is its not, sadly. How about all the disabled people you are referring take some action themselves and invest in the development of such a utility. People whom live with such disabilities are never going to have the same experience as one without, fact. I mean if Yahoo and Google don’t care then there must not be much of a return… just saying.

I really don’t get why its the developers fault that there is no money in creating a tool to provide JavaScript accessibility to the disabled. Its really mind boggling. If it were important enough there would be a solution to it, but that thing is its not, sadly. How about all the disabled people you are referring take some action themselves and invest in the development of such a utility. People whom live with such disabilities are never going to have the same experience as one without, fact. I mean if Yahoo and Google don’t care then there must not be much of a return… just saying.

The Web Accessible Initative, Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) - home page, has for years encourage and supported making the web more accessible. Their recommendations and guidelines not only make it possible for assistive technology to work more effectively but, I believe, following and adhering to the guidelines lead to much better design.

A lot of people, and it seems to be becoming increasing true, design their sites with an expectation that javascript will be enabled and if this is not the case the large parts of the functionality is not available or behaviour is erratic.

Maybe the answer is to switch of javascript to get some idea of what it is like for a disabled person to use the web.

You’ll find out if you disable JS you cannot comment on the SP Blogs for instance, which is rather a strange redesign strategy. Discriminating against users that for whatever valid reason don’t have access to JS on their user-agent - disallowing them the chance of posting replies.

So that would be a good demo exercise about what happens when you poorly implement JS. When a sever-side technology could have easily handled a SUBMIT button on a simple reply style form. I surf without JS enabled the majority of the time and do have a disability.

I surf without JS enabled the majority of the time and do have a disability.

Can I ask you why? Do you have assistive technology? Are there limitations in its use?

Do you think this is a strategy (switching of javascript) followed by other people with disabilities?

Sorry if these question seem intrusive.

Philip, I don’t require AT but spell-checkers help me quite a bit. :wink: It is my choice plus there are my bandwidth issues as one small factor.

I do believe various people with disabilities may be surfing using different contexts; so the answer is ‘yes’ you should consider that various badly implemented scripts may create barriers. I agree that reasonable adjustments should be made or progressive enhancement techniques applied so the site at least has basic core functionality.

If you are planing on something that DEPENDS on on js or CSS you are already going the wrong way on the information superhighway.

I am surprised , TW, in fact that it those percentages aren’t higher .

  1. big corps will turn js of, not only for security but for convenience. By volume on could say the chief internet use of js pop-ups and spam ( by volume).

  2. In my own opinion , much of the script out there is poorly coded… I have hit many a site that give me that “script is causing UA to run slow… " error… so I disable js entirely … then forget I did so until the next time I am testing one of my own scripts and puzzling over why I cant even get alert(”!"); to work.

  3. I cant figure out why anyone would turn off css , but I figure it could be similar reasoning… a broken page layout makes info inaccessible, the user turns to browsing sans -css… not pretty but at least he can READ the info.

If you are planing on something that DEPENDS on on js or CSS you are already going the wrong way on the information superhighway.

This is what you have to think of when you think of CSS or js off. If the delivery of your content fails w/o CSS or js then your site idea fails…even if only .0002% of people had CSS and js off. if it’s just a cosmetic thing… then it not really that important to begin with… think of it as “progressive enhancement” for the 98% of the people who chose to have js and CSS on.

Only a tiny tiny percentage of the world pop is blind, probably less that 2% … yet it is desirable coding practice to have description of the images (usually alt=“…”) for or use CSS techniques that do no t hide info from screen readers… ( these may have java off too… btw). No one says "yeah my code will make things inaccessible to blind folk, but HEY they are only .05% of the users anyway)

I agree completely with dresden. My typical approach is to get all my HTML done before I do my CSS. Then I do my CSS before any of my Javascript. Then finally I add my Javascript. At every level it is perfectly usable. Fancy things may be missing, but at least it’s usable.

It isn’t something I’ve had to do recently, but there were some sites that I used to use regularly where the colour scheme was that bad that combined with small fonts and a slightly odd and iffy monitor, the site became completely illegible. Unstyled content was much easier to read!

Of course modern browsers allow you to change the CSS and JavaScript settings on a site by site basis.

Another consideration with CSS is that there are many different media out there and the CSS that works for one will not necessarily produce something usable on a different media. Unless you provide media specific CSS those using the alternate media may only be able to use your page if they turn CSS off.

Another reason to turn off CSS is if you are printing something. A lot of times I’ll disable CSS if I’m going to print a document because it’ll use less color and paper (assuming the HTML follows the document flow in some reasonable way).

It depends on the gallery setup, but I often add a height to the gallery container so that, with JS off, you don’t get all the images / content spilling down the page. Then you can add overflow: auto to the container so that the user will at least get a scroll bar allowing the other images / content to be accessed.

(BTW, I don’t like to set heights on elements, but sometimes you have to compromise a bit. :frowning: )

and also assuming that the web page author was too lazy to provide CSS for printing.

I think you can continue with CSS and Javascript. There very little people who have disabled javascript or CSS. These people who disable Javascript are one who are techy and if they something wrong they will automatically turn it on. But going div way is useful for you.