On 31st October - 1st November 2002 the QA Focus team participated in an all-programme meeting held at the University of Nottingham. Shortly before the meeting a number of surveys of the JISC 5/99 project Web sites were carried out. A summary of the findings is given below.
Please note the following:
The surveys have been carried out using a number of automated tools.
It is recognised that:
Despite these limitations, the surveys aim to provide an initial indication of the approaches taken by projects and of compliance with best practices.
Summary: The W3C's HTML validation service was used to report on the compliance with HTML standards of project home pages.
Report: Report - Report Summary
Summary: The W3C's CSS validation service was used to report on the compliance with CSS standards of project home pages.
Report: Report - Report Summary
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 - Report Summary
Summary: The 404 error pages for project Web sites were analysed.
Report: Report - Report Summary
Summary: The 'Internet Archive' Web site was access in order to discover if project Web sites were available in the archive.
Report: Report - Report Summary
Summary: The pages allows project Web sites to be accessed on a PDA using the AvantGo service.
Report: Report
Summary: An analysis of a survey of the ease with which the entry point for project Web sites can be converted to XHTML.
Report: Report - Report Summary
Summary: An analysis of a survey of the ease with which the entry point for project Web sites can be converted to WML, the format used by WAP phones.
Report: Report - Report Summary
Summary: An analysis of project Web site server software is available.
Report: Report - Report Summary
Summary: An analysis of the use of Dublin Core metadata on the entry point of project Web sites. The results are obtained by an XSLT extraction of an XHTML representation of the page.
Report: Report - Report Summary
A number of posters have been produced based on the surveys.
A number of documents have been produced to provide advice on best practices related to the areas covered in 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.