Web Experience Toolkit (WET)

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What is the Web Experience Toolkit?

• An award-winning front-end framework for building websites that are accessible, usable, interoperable, mobile friendly and multilingual
• A collection of flexible and themeable templates and reusable components
• A collaborative open source project led by the Government of Canada

Key resources

• Documentation
• Downloads
• Examples
• Version history and roadmap
• Terms and conditions (MIT license)
• Source code repository and contributing guidelines
• Communications material
• Websites using WET

Benefits

Accessibility

• Conforms to WCAG 2.0 level AA
• Leverages WAI-ARIA to further enhance accessibility
• Assistive technology testing (Access Working Group)

Usability

• Iterative approach to design
• Design patterns and usability testing (User Experience Working Group)

Interoperability

• HTML5-first approach (leveraging native HTML5 support and filling support gaps with “polyfills”)
• Supporting a wide variety of browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera)
• Building support for HTML data (RDFa 1.1 Lite, Schema.org)

Mobile friendly responsive design

• Adapts to different screen sizes and device capabilities
• Touchscreen support
• Optimized for performance
• Building support for device-based mobile applications

Multilingual

• Currently supports 33 languages (including right-to-left languages)
• English
• French
• Afrikaans
• Albanian
• Arabic
• Armenian
• Bulgarian
• Chinese
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Czech
• Dutch
• Estonian
• German
• Greek
• Hindi
• Hungarian
• Icelandic
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Portuguese (Brazilian)
• Russian
• Slovak
• Spanish
• Thai
• Turkish
• Ukranian
• Vietnamese

Themeable and reusable

• Flexible framework that supports custom themes
• Includes support for 5 different themes including a “Base” theme to use as a template
• Reusable templates, plugins and widgets
• Adapted to various CMS and programming frameworks (Drupal, WordPress, SharePoint (in development), DotNetNuke (in development), PHP, SSI, Java/Maven)

Reduces costs by openly sharing and collaborating

• Drives down research and development costs
• Avoids duplication of effort
• Produces better quality results

Collaborative approach

• Project managed openly on GitHub, including discussion through the issues tracker
• Encouraging a free flow of ideas, dialogue and innovation including sharing of challenges and ideas
• External contributions welcome
• Pull requests
• Design patterns
• Issues and suggestions
• Documentation
• Testing
• Multi-level review process for contributions to ensure code integrity (combination of automated and manual reviews)