Image Replacement Using Cufon (Javascript)

[DirectiveGroup]

Our agency is working with an outside developer that has designed a beautiful site. The possible problem is that they used Cufon to change a large amount of the text on the page to an image of the text in a nicer font. On some pages all of the text is replaced and on others its about 20%. The text that is replaced is identical to what is shown to the user.

I realize that Google has stated that sIFR (similar to Cufon) is okay, in a limited way years ago, but I am stil a little leery of the large amount of image replacement that is happening. I am also worried about user experience, should flash not be enabled or it is slower to load.  So I have a couple questions.

1. Would this amount of image replacment raise a flag to Google, especially since it is the heading tags and large chunks of the body content both?

2. I know about 2% of the site's users do not have javascript enabled. Do you have an idea of what percentage of people have issues, like slow connection speeds or slow computers, using javascript even if it is enabled?

[MentorMate]

1. It shouldn't have any negative impact at all. If you are concerned about it I recommend implementing Google's Font API instead, they're definitely not going to punish you for that!

2. It will just show regular text if they don't have javascript enabled. Try it yourself, disable javascript in web developer firefox add-on to see what they see. I'd be primarily concerned about mobile visitors, in which case you should should disable cufon for mobile visitors.