QA Focus Visit To Scotland, September 2002

On Thursday 26^th September 2002 the QA Focus team attended a meeting at the University of Edinburgh to liaise with JISC 5/99 projects in Scotland. Shortly before the visit a small number of surveys of the JISC 5/99 project Web sites was carried out. A summary of the findings is given below.

Project Web Sites Surveyed

Summary: Six project Web sites are to be surveyed. It should be noted that this is not necessarily the complete set of JISC 5/99 projects based in Scotland.

Report: Report

Accessibility Of Project Web Site Home Page

Summary: The Bobby automated accessibility checking tool was used to report on the accessibility of project home pages. Of the six pages surveyed two provided AA compliance with W3C WAI guidelines. The other pages contained a small number of accessibility problems, such as missing ALT tags.

Report: Report

HTML Compliance Of Project Web Site Home Page

Summary: The W3C's HTML validation service was used to report on the compliance with HTML standards of project home pages. Of the six entry points surveyed only one complied with HTML standards. One page did not have a DOCTYPE and three had no character encoding. Two pages had large numbers of errors which appear to indicate use of an authoring tool which produces non-compliant HTML.

Report: Report

Access To Project Web Sites From A PDA

Summary: The AvantGo service was used to make the project Web sites available on a PDA. Of the six Web sites all were made available on a Palm PDA.

Report: Report

Access To Project Web Sites From The 'Internet Archive'

Summary: The 'Internet Archive' Web site was access in order to discover if project Web sites available in the archive.

Report: Report

---

Background To The Surveys

QA Focus is developing a toolkit which will allow projects themselves to validate their own procedures for monitoring compliance with standards and best practices.

The first step in the development of the toolkit is the use of automated Web-based tools which are freely available for use by all. The tools will be used with clusters of JISC 5/99 projects in order to gain experience in the use of such tools.

We hope that the comparisons which can be made across projects will help in ensuring that examples of best practices can be identified allowing the approaches used to be adopted by other projects.