Government digital experience standards

Based on public policy, web protocol, guidelines and best practices.

Topic Standard Guidance
The name which should be displayed for the overall site
The type of the object
The title of the object as it should appear within the graph
A one to two sentence description of the object
The canonical URL of the object that will be used as its permanent ID in the graph
An image URL which should represent the object within the graph
A description of what is in the image
Defines the document's title that is shown in a browser's title bar or a page's tab
A short and accurate summary of the content of the page
Gives hints about the size of the initial size of the viewport
Privacy and integrity protection.
Sponsored top-level domain (.gov / .edu / .mil).
A single canonical domain is reachable with www and non-www input.
The HTTP status of /sitemap.xml is OK.
The sitemap file type is XML.
Every link on the home page is in the sitemap.
The site has a valid robots policy.
The robots policy allows access to browsers and scrapers.
The robots.txt file points to a sitemap file.
Indicates that another page is representative of the content on the page
The site automatically upgrades from HTTP to HTTPS and instructs browsers to use HTTPS going forward.
The site restricts what can be loaded.
The site prevents mime type sniffing.
The site has a security.txt file.
The application code is received within 0.8 seconds.
The page begins to display within 1.8 seconds.
A large part of the application has been displayed within 2.5 seconds.
The page does not move visible elements around during initial display for more than 0.1 seconds at a time.
It takes the application less than 0.2 seconds to respond to a user interaction.
Opportunities to improve legibility by ensuring sufficient background, foreground color contrast and that links are discernible without relying on color.
Improve accessibility by providing sufficient area on touch elements and allowing the viewport sizing to be controlled by the visitor.
Provide the expected tags and attributes so each document can be easily used with a screen reader.
These are opportunities to improve keyboard navigation in your application.
These are opportunities to improve the usage of ARIA in your application which may enhance the experience for users of assistive technology, like a screen reader.
Follow these recommendations to improve the experience for visitors who may take advantage of translations.
These are opportunities to provide alternative content for audio and video. This may improve the experience for users with hearing or vision impairments.
These are opportunities to improve the experience of reading tabular or list data using assistive technology, like a screen reader.
Follow these recommendations to avoid hiding content from visitors using assistive technology.
Site is available for crawling and indexing by well behaved agents.
The main content of each page is available in the initial document. It does not require a lot of client side script execution in order to render. If pagse usually require a lot of client side script execution to render main content the content may be made available to bots in an alternate text version of the site.