pa website validator

Template adhesion assessment app

A desktop application to support developers that helps evaluate the quality of the institutional sites of Municipalities and schools and the correspondence to many of the compliance criteria of measure 1.4.1 of the PNRR Citizen experience in digital public services.

The evaluation apps are tools that integrate the Lighthouse library and carry out tests to verify correct adherence to the Municipalities model and the Designers Italia school model.

Find out more about Assessment Apps.

Functionality

• Ability to launch auditing on an online or local website.
• Ability to use the package as a global dependency by running it as a cli-application.
• Ability to integrate the package as an NPM dependency into third-party projects.

Testing the Schools model

Test	Description
Compliance criteria	The results of the audits relating to the conformity criteria of the school model are shown.
Design recommendations	The results of the audits relating to the design recommendations of the school model are shown.
Additional tests	Standard test results provided by lighthouse are shown. They are not relevant in terms of achieving the compliance criteria, but they still represent useful indications for evaluating any improvements to the site.
Design recommendation "R.SC.3.1 - Speed ​​and response times"	The test result for the design recommendation "R.SC.3.1 - Speed ​​and response times" for the school site is shown.

Testing the Municipalities model

Test	Description
Informed Citizen Package: criterion "C.SI.4.1 - Speed ​​and response times"	The result of the test relating to the "C.SI.4.1 - Speed ​​and response times" criterion for the municipal site is shown.
Informed Citizen Package: compliance criteria	The results of the audits relating to the compliance criteria for the municipal site are shown.
Active Citizen Package: compliance criteria	Results of audits relating to compliance criteria for municipal digital services are shown.
Informed Citizen Package: project recommendations	The results of the audits relating to the design recommendations for the municipal site are shown.
Additional tests	Standard test results provided by lighthouse are shown. They are not relevant in terms of achieving the compliance criteria, but they still represent useful indications for evaluating any improvements to the site.

Reports and messages in console

The application generates a Lighthouse-style report of the evaluation result, which is displayed in the browser. Furthermore, in the console where the command was launched, messages relating to the audits that the application is conducting at that moment are shown in real time, including error messages; in particular, for each page that is loaded, messages of the following type will appear:

 ...
https://esempio.scuola.edu.it/novita/ 200
https://esempio.scuola.edu.it/didattica/ 200
...

which indicate the result of loading the page in question (200 = success). This information can be used to debug a site or the application itself.

Technologies

PA Website Validator uses the following technologies

• Node.js - Javascript runtime
• npm - Package manager
• Lighthouse - Extended core library for running audits
• Typescript - Strongly typed programming language that is based on JavaScript

Requirements

PA Website Validator requires Node.js v18+ (LTS), npm and Google Chrome.

Plugins

PA Website validator uses the following main external dependencies

Plugins	Repositories
Lighthouse	GitHub
Yargs	GitHub
Puppeteer	GitHub
Cheerio	GitHub
JSDOM	GitHub
Geo Ip	GitHub
Get SSL Certificate	GitHub

Local installation

For local installation, once the repository is cloned, run:

 cd pa-website-validator
npm install

The dist directory will be populated with the output of the build process.

Usage:

 node dist --type  --destination  --report  --website  --scope  --view

Example:

 node dist --type school --destination ~/pa-italia-crawler-reports --report myreport --website https://www.ismonnet.edu.it/ --scope online --view --accuracy all 

Global installation

Once the global installation has been carried out, you will be able to use the pa-website-validator command from the terminal, without having to enter the cloned directory. This is the procedure to install the command globally:

 cd pa-website-validator
npm install
npm install -g --install-links

NB : You may need to restart the shell/terminal for command propagation and clearing the npm cache:

 npm cache clean

Usage:

 pa-website-validator --type  --destination  --report  --website  --scope  --view

Example:

 pa-website-validator --type school --destination ~/pa-italia-crawler-reports --report myreport --website https://www.ismonnet.edu.it/ --scope online --view --accuracy all 

Command options

Command parameter	Description	Obligatory	Possible values	Default
- -help	Show command map	❌
- -version	Package version	❌
- -type	Type of crawler to launch	✅	"municipality" "school"
- -destination	Folder where to save the reports	✅
- -report	Name to assign to the report	✅
- -website	Website URL to analyze	✅
- -scope	Scopes of execution	❌	"local" "online"	"online"
- -view	Instant report viewing	❌
- -accuracy	Defines the morbidity of the scan	✅	"min", "suggested", "high", "all"	"suggested"

Notes:

• --type indicates which type of website is being inspected (municipal or school).

• --scope indicates the type of audit to be performed:

  • local if the tool is launched on a website in a local environment: it performs all the audits that work on the structure of the inspected site and shows information messages for some audits that do not produce results if performed in a local environment.
  • online performs all available audits.

• --view if passed to the command at the end of the auditing launches an instance of chrome that automatically shows the generated reports.

• --accuracy indicates the accuracy of the scan, defined as the number of pages scanned:

  • all the scan is performed on all available pages.