- What is digital accessibility?
Digital accessibility means making digital content and services understandable and usable by people with all kinds of disabilities. To achieve this, digital products and services must be developed with an understanding of the audience for which they are intended, and comply with a certain number of best practices in terms of conception, development, design and writing.
It is estimated that between 15% and 20% of the world’s population is affected by some form of disability, or around 12 million people in France. More information on digital accessibility in France.
The concept of disability is legally defined by Law 2005-102 (article 114) on equal rights and opportunities, participation and citizenship for people with disabilities:
“Constitutes a disability, within the meaning of this law, any limitation of activity or restriction of participation in life in society suffered in his environment by a person because of a substantial, lasting or permanent impairment of one or more physical, sensory, mental, cognitive or psychic functions, a multiple disability or a disabling health disorder.”
According to this definition, an environment designed to be accessible to people with impaired function does not put them in a situation of disability.
Digital accessibility concerns 4 major families of disabilities:
- Visual disabilities: visually impaired people may need to zoom in on pages, change font settings (font, size, spacing) or have difficulty distinguishing insufficient colour contrast. Blind people navigate the web using assistive technologies (Braille reader, text-to-speech). Page navigation must not interfere with these possibilities.
- Hearing disabilities: people who are deaf or hard of hearing cannot hear all or part of the audio content broadcast on the web, particularly in the case of videos which, for example, have to be subtitled and transcribed.
- Motor disabilities: people with motor difficulties (disability, gripping difficulties, tremors) in the upper limbs may have difficulty clicking on interaction zones that are too small, navigating exclusively with the keyboard or using various assistive technologies. These contexts of use must be anticipated when the website is developed.
- Cognitive disabilities: whether you’re talking about dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, autism, Down’s syndrome, or any type of neuro-atypism, the website must not make it difficult to navigate and understand: simple ergonomics, linear page layout, clear messages, content and language adapted to all types of reader, etc.
- What are the legal obligations?
The obligation to make public websites accessible to people with disabilities was introduced by article 47 of the law of 11 February 2005. These obligations were specified by the decree of 14 May 2009, which set a deadline of 2 years for state services and 3 years for local authorities.
Since 2012, all public sites, whether belonging to government departments or local authorities, have been subject to the accessibility obligation. In addition, from 23 September 2019, public websites must publish an accessibility declaration and display their compliance on the home page.
The accessibility obligation extends to intranet and extranet sites, as well as mobile applications, software packages and digital street furniture.
- What is the accessibility control framework?
The Référentiel Général d’Amélioration de l’Accessibilité (RGAA – General Accessibility Improvement Reference System) is used to check the accessibility of a site and its content in accordance with the international digital accessibility standards known as WCAG. In France, the accessibility rate of a site is calculated by auditing it against the RGAA criteria.
The RGAA defines a technical method and proposes an operational framework for checking compliance with accessibility requirements. It comprises 106 RGAA control criteria, with an average of 2.5 tests per criterion. Some tests refer to implementation techniques (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.) to check that the criterion has been met, in order to reduce the margin for interpretation in terms of compliance with accessibility standards.
The current version of the RGAA is 4.1 and was published on 18 February 2021. Consult the RGAA criteria.
