Accessibility and Security
Web Accessibility
The Tempo Cantabile website is intended to be accessible to the widest possible audience. We are actively working towards achieving a fully accessible website that conform to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0
Alternative text (Guideline 1.1)
Images on the Tempo Cantabile website have alternative text attributes, aslo known as "alt" text. Hence, if an image is used on the web page to convey information, its content is also described in the alt text. Such feature allows the images to be understood by text browsers.
Dustinguishable colors of text and background (Guideline 1.4)
The design of the Tempo Cantabile website ensured visual presentation of text has a contrast ration of at least 4.5:1. In addition, large scale text is also used as default text size of this site.
Future Upgrade Plan to Improve Accessibility
We plan to enhance accessibility features by adding the "tabindex" and "accesskey" attributes. The tabindex attribute allow website visitors to move from on form control to another using the "Tab" key. The accesskey attribute create hot keys that allow visitors to navigate the cursor to a form control. The upgrade would make the website more keyboard friendly. (Guideline 2.1). Such features would be implemented by using standard HTML form controls and link elements to provide keyboard operation and assistive technology interoperability of interactive user interface element.
The disadvantage of implementing the above attributes would be that they are not supported by older browsers such as Netscape 4.
Future Upgrade Plan to Improve Security
As our website being further developed, more on-resources listed on the Resource tab. On line course materials as well as forum discussions would be delivered through the website. Such feature is currently delivered through the social networking application, i.e. Facebook.
It is our intention to creat a virtual community of Tempo Cantabile of our own. So we are working to protect our data, such as personal information of staff and our web application subscribers, from hackers. Our plan for securing the website is to implement user identification via usernames and passwords for access to our e-resources.
References
World Wide Web Consortium. (2008). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. Retrieve May 20, 2012, from http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/
World Wide Web Consortium. (2011). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Overview. Retrieve May 20, 2012, from http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php
Lloyd, I. (2012). accesskey (HTML attribute). Retrieved May 21, 2012 from http://reference.sitepoint.com/html/select/accesskey
Lloyd, I. (2012). tabindex (HTML attribute). Retrieved May 21, 2012 from http://reference.sitepoint.com/html/select/tabindex
Felke-Morris, T. (2011). Web development and design foundations with XHTML (5th ed.). Boston: Pearson.
Bell, S. (2008). Design for all : how web accessibility affects different people. In J. Craven Web accessibility : practical advice for the library and information professional (pp. 25-39). London: Facet Publishing.