Central government is committed to ensuring the user-friendliness, accessibility, design and findability of the information it provides online. It holds that everyone should be able to find, use and view government sites. To this end, central government implements version 2 of the Web Guidelines.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
The Web Guidelines are based on the internationally recognised guidelines issued by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These guidelines deal with issues like accessibility, design and sustainability of websites.
Web Guidelines: apply or explain
The Web Guidelines are included in the list of mandatory open standards of the Standardisation Forum. All the open standards on this list are governed by the ‘apply or explain’ principle. This means that government agencies must apply the standards on the list (‘apply’), unless there is a compelling reason not to. In that case, they are obliged to account for that decision in a transparent way (‘explain’).
Central Government Online Platform
This website makes use of a shared infrastructure (central government online platform), which complies with the functional technical requirements of the Web Guidelines. Other parts of the Web Guidelines lay down requirements regarding the site’s content.