Accessibility
According to Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, “The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect” (cited in Felke-Morris, 2011, p. 5). Freiburg City Tours strives to reflect these values through this website. Although this site is currently quite simple it sports an uncluttered design and supports visitors using screen readers through the use of Alternative Text (alt) for images.
However, future iterations of this site will seek to go further and comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) developed by W3C. The guidelines are developed around four principles which state that content on the web must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust (W3C, 2012).
Freiburg City Tours have set the target of achieving this goal by July 2013 and work will begin once the website has been relaunched in XHTML. Although these changes will be time consuming and costly to implement they will benefit our users and as a result a wider range of people will be exposed to the services we offer.
Security
The security of this website’s users is of the highest importance to Freiburg City Tours and we are currently planning a significant security upgrade which will enable us to take online payments. This upgrade is expected to be complete by July 2013.
The data that is transmitted by our website is currently unsecured. In order to accept online payments and issue online booking confirmations Freiburg City Tours will implement the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) protocol. SSL allows “data to be privately exchanged over public networks” (Felke-Morris, 2011, p. 477). Our users will be assured that the site is secured by the https in the address bar and the lock icon displayed in the status bar of some browsers.
The main disadvantage to the site’s security upgrade is the cost and time involved with implementing the planned changes. However, these costs are mitigated by the advantages that arise from a website that will be able to offer increased and more secure functionality to its customers.
References
Felke-Morris, T. (2011). Web development & design foundations with XHTML (5th ed.). Boston: Pearson.
W3C. (2011). WCAG 2 at a Glance. In Web Accessibility Initiative. Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/glance/