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# Web Experience Toolkit (WET)

## 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
- Style guide

### WET project

- Source code repository (Github)
- Project documentations and design decision
- contributing guidelines
- Version history
- Release dates
- Websites using WET
- Communications material
- Notice about WET v3.1
- Terms and conditions (MIT license)

## 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 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
  - 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 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:
  2016-06-09