Accessibility and security upgrade
Accessibility feature
Alternative text for images has been used in this site except for when redundant. The <alt> tag enables alternative text to be provided for vision impaired users and for when images are unavailable (W3C, 2013). Providing quality descriptive information about what the image enables these users to experience the website the same as if they could see the images (Felke-Morris, 2013, p. 198).
Future upgrade plan
Accessibility
We acknowledge that some of our clients may have hearing, movement and cognition impairments or age-related conditions that could impede their use of our site. We aim to implement WCAG 2.0 guidelines to enable accessibility to all our clients through the principles of being perceivable, operable, understandable and robust (W3C, 2008).
- Ensure a keyboard can be used to navigate the site for those who can’t use a mouse (W3C, 2013).
- Add captions and transcripts for video and audio for vision and hearing impaired clients (Felke-Morris, 2013, p. 199; W3C, 2013).
- Add 'skip to main content' link at the top of each page to enable clients using screen readers to skip past the navigation bar (Felke-Morris, 2013, p. 205).
- Add ability for clients to change text size (Felke-Morris, 2013, p. 198).
- Improve colour contrast (keeping the current scheme of green, red and blue) to be WCAG AAA compliant. The current colour scheme is WCAG AA compliant via test at http://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html.
- Test accessibility with WAVE (wave.webaim.org).
Security
As part of our services, we want to set up seasonal specials where clients can purchase gardening deals for themselves or others. This means that we need to add security to the site to maintain our clients’ privacy and security of sensitive data when processing purchases.
- Add Security Sockets Layer (SSL) for purchasing the special deals using a credit model, such as PayPal (Felke-Morris, 2013, pp. 495-6).
- Add security to database and back up of client data (Felke-Morris, 2013, p. 489).
Advantages
- Accessibility changes is a step towards universal access for our clients with impairments or conditions.
- Increased security measures to protect our customers' data and purchases.
Disadvantages
- Additional costs for each payment involved with using payment services such as PayPal (as outlined in the PayPal Combined Financial Services Guide and Product Disclosure Statement).
References
Felke-Morris, T. (2013). Web development & design foundations with HTML5 (6th ed.). Boston: Pearson.
W3C. (2008). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. Retrieved 14 May 2013 from http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/.
W3C. (2013). Accessibility. Retrieved 14 May 2013 from http://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/accessibility.