Following on from the RNIB’s web accessibility initiatives, web compliance experts Magus Ltd and The British Standards Institute are working together to create a new publically accessible standard (PAS 124) for websites. Web standards govern the effectiveness, function and appearance of a website, and include: brand, legal, accessibility, search engine optimisation (SEO), usability and technical standards.

Websites are increasingly the key communication vehicle for a company, its brand and products. Despite this, research from Magus shows that many of the world’s leading organisations don’t have formal brand and technical standards defined to govern their websites. Even those that do are failing to effectively implement or enforce them, achieving full compliance with less than 20% of their own web standards. The websites of these organisations significantly under-perform or damage the brand as a result.

PAS 124 will help to protect the significant investment organisations are making in their web presence and online brands, by establishing best practice for “defining, implementing and managing organisational web standards”. It will provide a clear framework to help organisations apply standards effectively to significantly improve online performance and protect the integrity of their brands.

More detail can be found on the BSI’s press release.

Thousands of businesses worldwide face the challenge of establishing their web presence; a goal difficult to achieve without efficient web site development and testing tools. If someone where to ask you how good your website was, how would you answer; could you answer? There are so many factors to take into consideration, such as code validation, speed of download accessibility, usability etc, that there is no one correct answer and subsequently no one website that can provide you the definitive answer.

This article was inspired by a great blog post at Aviva Directory, entitled Grade Your Website: 31 Free Online Tests.

Below is a compendium of tools I use on a regular basis to test website I work on, based on Aviva Directory’s headings (incidentally they list the same tools I use regularly).:

Code Validation

The WDG HTML Validator is an excellent tool for identifying syntax errors on pages driven by markup languages. There is also an option to recursively check for errors on every page in the website directory, which is invaluable when checking large, dynamic websites.

The W3C Link Checker searches for and identifies broken links for a given URL. The tool specifically checks that all the links are de-referenceable, no links and anchors are defined twice and warns about invalid http and directory redirects.

Accessibility

Watchfire’s WebXACT is a must use tool for all serious designers and developers. The tool lets you test single pages and generates a very detailed report on the quality, accessibility and privacy of a website.

Speed

Web Page Analyzer from Website Optimization is an excellent tool that calculates page size, composition, and download time. The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component (objects, CSS, images etc). Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time. The script incorporates best practices web site optimisation techniques into its recommendations.

Browser Simulator

Browsershots is a tool, created by Johann C. Rocholl, which takes screenshots of your website in various browsers and platforms including Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows, Firefox and Safari on Mac OS X and Iceweasal and Konqueror on Linux. When the user submits a URL it is added to a job queue. Unfortunately the queue requires you to wait up to three hours before retrieving your screenshots, but the results provide a clear indication of how the website will be received by different user setups.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO Workers SEO Analysis Tool is an extremely useful tool that analyses an assortment of page features including meta tags, keyword density and load time. A user simply submits a URL for testing and the report is returned.

The Web Accessibility Toolbar, provided by the Accessible Information Solutions (AIS) team at the National Information and Library Service (NILS) , Australia, is a tool for advanced users or web developers, that helps to examine the structure, components and accessibility features of any given web page. It installs as an Internet Explorer (version 5+, Windows) toolbar and offers several integrated tools to inspect style sheets, tables, frames, images and more, as well as a wide variety of tests and features that are provide by other web sites, including link checks, HTML validation, page download speed, colour simulations, page resolutions and much more. A nice toolbox for web developers.

The toolbar can be downloaded via the following link: http://www.snapfiles.com/get/AccessibilityToolbar.html

The Web Accessibility Toolbar has been developed to aid manual examination of web pages for a variety of aspects of accessibility. It consists of a range of functions that:

• Identify components of a web page
• Facilitate the use of 3rd party online applications
• Simulate user experiences
• Provide links to references and additional resources

Much like Chris Pederic’s Web Developer Toolbar, which was popularised through Firefox, this toolbar can be used as an aid for manual checking of many of the Web Content Accessibility Guideline’s Checkpoints (WCAG) 1.0. None of the toolbar functions listed will tell you whether a page conforms to a particular checkpoint, but they will help you in assessing conformance.