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

Resources

Examples

Working examples of all WET plugin, including developer tools

Documentation

Technical documentation and plugins configuration specification.

Downloads

Binaries and release notes of WET-BOEW and Canada.ca theme

Canada.ca theme (GCWeb)

Technical resources and reference implementation of the Canada.ca content and IA specification

Style guide

Style, Writing, Design, and Accessibility Guide for Web Experience Toolkit (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 (Edge, 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 34 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

• Inuktitut

• Italian

• Japanese

• Korean

• Latvian

• Lithuanian

• Polish

• Portuguese

• Portuguese (Brazilian)

• Russian

• Slovak

• Spanish

• Thai

• Turkish

• Ukrainian

• 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 and 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)

Date modified: 2023-06-19