Education, citizenship, health, leisure... The web has now become essential in every aspect of our lives. As a result, the accessibility of digital tools has become a matter of equality, social and professional integration, for which web players and public authorities are responsible. Here, we offer an overview of the evolution of the French web in this area, as well as the regulations governing it, in order to clarify our levers for action.
Accessibility: enabling all users to perceive, navigate, and interact with a digital product
Allowing all users to perceive, navigate, and interact with a digital product is the purpose of accessibility. It is an issue that particularly concerns people with visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive disabilities, but also other specific groups such as children and the elderly.
Digital accessibility consists of making web content:
- Perceptible: several best practices help to improve visual and auditory perception, for example by providing text alternatives to images, simplifying the layout, etc.
- Usable: providing users with elements to guide navigation, making functionalities accessible by keyboard, etc.
- Understandable: ensuring that pages behave predictably, helping users correct input errors, etc.
- Robust: optimizing compatibility with assistive technologies, for example.
This is far from being a trivial issue, as 12 million people live with a disability in France, according to the Ministry of Health. It is also worth noting that three quarters of those over 20 and 97% of those over 60 experience vision problems.
Guaranteeing equal access, independence, and inclusion for people with disabilities
At a time when information and services are increasingly digitized both in the public sector (citizenship, registration, health insurance) and in the private sector (medical consultations, banking services, online shopping), the web is becoming an ever more important resource for all aspects of our lives.
For this reason, accessibility is a matter of equal access to digital services. It ensures independence, and social and professional integration for people with disabilities, making accessibility an essential requirement for the digital transformation of services.
Conceived as a "global village", the pioneers of the internet were driven by an ideal of universality. They envisioned a space for all citizens of the world, without barriers of education, language, culture, etc.
A vision that goes hand-in-hand with the French and European social model. In France, since 2005, the law for equal rights and opportunities has created accessibility obligations for public sites and companies with a turnover of more than 250 million euros. Reinforced in 2023 following the National Disability Conference, it has introduced in particular penalties of up to 50,000 euros in case of non-compliance and the designation of a regulatory authority (notably Arcom).
For its part, the European Union has issued two directives, in 2016 and then in 2019. In support, it created the standard EN 301 549 V2.1.2 (2028 - 08) based on the international Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) established by the W3C.
Thus, the relevant public and private entities are required to publish:
- An accessibility statement: following an audit based on the RGAA, the General Accessibility Improvement Framework published by the state, which makes it possible to assess the accessibility level of a digital product. It is based on the work of the W3C.
- A multi-year plan: a document detailing an entity’s digital accessibility policy over a period of no more than three years.
- An annual action plan
Training, tools, and assessment: the keys to an accessible digital product?
According to several studies and reports, one of the main conditions for improving accessibility is the training of web project designers and developers. They must understand the constraints of disability and know the best practices associated with it, as detailed in a previous article.
This is why, for our part, we have appointed an accessibility coordinator. Holder of a professional certification in digital accessibility, he or she can:
- Detect accessibility errors on a website using the RGAA;
- Design a corrective solution for each point of non-compliance;
- Inform and advise stakeholders, keeping them up to date on the legal and technical context of digital accessibility;
- Evaluate technical corrections following an audit.
We also make sure to support our internal teams on this topic.
On a daily basis, our teams rely on the RGAA as well as the work of the W3C (WCAG 2.1 and the ARIA standard). Concretely, we use dedicated tools at every stage of a web project: UX and UI design, Drupal development, quality assurance, contribution.
For example, our designers systematically check the contrast levels of colors using the Usecontrast tool.
Drupal and accessibility
As for Drupal, our favorite CMS, its architecture strives to respect web accessibility standards and best practices (WCAG) more and more!
Drupal indeed supports the creation of accessible forms by allowing the use of appropriate tags and attributes for form fields, labels, and error messages. This makes form interaction easier for users with motor or cognitive limitations. It of course also makes it possible to add alternative descriptions (alt text) to images, an essential point for people with visual impairments. These make it possible for screen readers to describe the image to users.
Drupal also has a wide range of accessibility modules developed by the community, extending the basic functionalities to address specific needs. For example, to add audio reading features for visually impaired users, to improve keyboard navigation, etc.
Example contributed Drupal modules to improve your projects’ accessibility:
- A11Y: Form helpers, to improve your forms’ accessibility;
- Block ARIA Landmark Roles, a module that adds extra elements to the block configuration forms, allowing users to assign an ARIA landmark role and/or ARIA labels to a block.
- CKEditor Abbreviation, a module that adds a button to CKEditor to insert and edit abbreviations.
- Editoria11y Accessibility Checker, a module that automatically checks contributed content to support editorial accessibility quality.
- High contrast, a module that allows users to quickly switch between the active theme and a high-contrast version.
- Style Switcher, a module that allows site visitors to choose which stylesheet to display the site with.
- Text Resize, a module that allows users to adjust font sizes.
- Automatic Alternative Text, a module that allows the use of AI to provide alternative text for an image when a user does not supply it...
Accessibility testing and the joys of DSFR
The quality assurance team also has its own tools, such as browser extensions to test code-related aspects of accessibility. Some examples include Axe, Pa11y, WAVE, and Google Lighthouse, which can identify issues such as images without alt text, low color contrast, unlabeled interactive elements, etc.
Furthermore, public institutions now have at their disposal the French Government Design System (DSFR), a library of ready-to-use graphical web components. These are created and made available by the state to standardize the interfaces of institutional websites, ensure compliance with ergonomics standards, accessibility, and good HTML-CSS practices.
Based on our knowledge of DSFR, the available guidelines and tools, we have been able to carry out some accessible web projects for both public and private organizations. Just to name a few:
- The Observatoires du Dialogue Social website (ODDS), a resource sharing platform about social dialogue in small and medium-sized businesses: 96% accessible (RGAA audit).
- The website limitesmaritimes.gouv.fr, the French official maritime boundaries portal: 96% accessible (RGAA audit).
- The Oise Department public transport website: 97% accessible (RGAA audit).
With the growing demand for using DSFR in our projects, we have even industrialized our processes to have a ready-to-use Drupal "starter theme" with DSFR! More details in our article.
Overall, there is still a long way to go.
The Contentsquare Foundation conducted a study in 2023 aimed at evaluating the level of RGAA compliance among major French websites. As part of this, the foundation audited the top 50 sites based on the 11 main RGAA criteria. These sites were classified into 4 categories:
- Banking (6): Boursorama, Société Générale, BNP Paribas, LCL, La Banque Postale…
- E-commerce (17): Amazon, Le Bon Coin, Decathlon, Orange, Fnac, Booking…
- Public sector (9): Pôle Emploi, Impots.gouv, CAF, Ameli…
- Media (18): Le Monde, France Info, Allocine, Netflix, BFM TV, Meteo France…
Main findings:
- 1 in 2 sites has a compliance rate below 50% based on the criteria analyzed.
- 1 in 2 sites does not meet legal requirements, meaning they do not publish an accessibility statement or a multi-year plan.
- 69% is the average compliance rate for the public sites analyzed, by far the most advanced in terms of accessibility. They are closely followed by the banking sector (61%), with media (44%) and e-commerce sites (36%) lagging further behind.
The majority of public sites analyzed exceed 70% compliance, which shows real commitment. However, this figure should be put into perspective, as according to the DINUM, only 45% of the most common online administrative procedures are accessible to people with disabilities.
To put it simply: great efforts have been made, but there is still a long way to go.
Is your site accessible?
Contact us to conduct an audit of your site!
For more information, see our commitments regarding accessibility.
Some useful resources to explore:
