Frequently Asked Questions
Barrier free design is what I call accessible design. It uses the exact same principles as the standards established by WCAG for digital accessibility. The biggest difference, honestly, is the terminology. It has been experience that people understand "barrier free" much easier than "digital accessibility".
Barrier free design is accessible design.
Responsive design is when a site is created in a way that has a positive user experience regardless of the type of device you view it on. I make sure that your site not only looks good on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or a phone; but that it also functions like it should.
Have you ever been to a website on your computer at home and it looks and functions great, but then you try to view it on your smart phone and the text is so small and you have to scroll way over to the right to see the actual scroll bar, or the links are stacked on top of one another, or you can't close that damn obnoxious pop up (notice there are no pop-ups here? It's because I despise them)? Those sites are NOT responsive.
This is variable depending on your industry and the information you collect.
We generally recommend that you cover your bases with a privacy policy, terms of service, cookie policy, and a disclaimer.
If you collect email addresses or have a contact form; a privacy policy is a necessity. If you run a fitness facility and offer health advice; a disclaimer is required; just as two examples. It is also recommended that you have an accessibility statement. SBD partners with a company that keeps all of our (and our clients') policies up to date in real time as privacy laws change.
Remember hearing the term "ambulance chasers"? Well, privacy policies protect your user and client data. It tells people what you use the information for. In Europe, having these policies is law (remember all the hoopla over GDPR?). Various privacy policies are making their way into individual states and soon nationally. Those ambulance chasers like to find websites that DON'T have these privacy policies and sue them. You need privacy policies, and I can help. As a data security partner with Termageddon, part of the hosting and maintenance plans are dynamic privacy policies to keep your policies up to date regardless of the updates that occur.
WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. Using WebP, I am able to create smaller in size but still high quality images that make the web faster.
WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and is the accepted international standards. It is used by website designers, developers, and web accessibility tool developers.
The WCAG technical documents are developed by the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG) (formerly the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group), which is part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
Under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (29 U.S.C. § 794 d), all federal agencies must ensure that any Information and Communication Technology (ICT) they “develop, procure, maintain or use” is accessible.
Section 508 Standards apply to the original developed software product (like a website, application, etc) and each new release/update as well.
ACR stands for "Accessibility Conformance Report" and is the report generated while testing/auditing a site for accessibility conformance.
A VPAT is a "voluntary product accessibility template" and is the template used to create an ACR (accessibility conformance report). It is a document that explains how a product -your website in this case- conforms to WCAG accessibility standards.
