Description
The accessibility of online public communication services concerns access to any type of information in digital form, regardless of the means of access, content and mode of consultation.
Decree on digital accessibility
Digital accessibility is a legal requirement for the websites of public services and territorial communities.
Decree no. 2019-768 of July 24, 2019 supplements the 2005 decree requiring public bodies to be digitally accessible.
And let's not forget the European legislative decree on accessibility requirements applicable to products and services.
Indeed, in it, it is stated that "the number of disabled people is increasing considerably" which makes the need to make services and products accessible all the more important.
Why make your content accessible?
Besides pure and simple compliance with the law, accessibility has many advantages:
- Favoring the integration of the entire population
- Increase site traffic .
- Improve page referencing
- Placing people at the heart of any digital approach
4 Fundamental principles
Be perceptible, users must be able to perceive through all their senses.
Be usable, the user interface and navigation must be usable, for example.
Be understandable, text content and web pages must be legible.
Be robust, content must be able to be reliably interpreted by a wide variety of users, including assistive technologies.
Types of disability that can be avoided with good accessibility
The disabilities targeted by digital accessibility can be divided into 4 main categories:
- Visual disability, linked to a vision anomaly (blindness, low vision, cataracts, color blindness, glaucoma...): between 1.7 and 2 million in France
- Hearing impairment, difficulty or inability to perceive sounds: 5.4 million in France
- Motor disability, limited ability to move parts of the body: 2.3 million in France
- Cognitive disability: disorders affecting reading, language, memorization (dyslexia, autism, ADHD): between 5 and 6 million in France
Current web standards
The preponderant digital content creation standards to date are those of the WCAG 2.1 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).
Put forward by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). They cover a set of guidelines divided according to the 4 main principles seen above (perceivable, usable, understandable and robust).
In France, the implementation of digital accessibility is based on the Référentiel général d'amélioration de l'accessibilité (RGAA), which is a transposition of the international digital accessibility rules defined by the WCAG.
The current version of the RGAA is 4.1 and was published on February 18, 2021.
The RGAA defines a technical method and proposes an operational framework for verifying compliance with accessibility requirements.
It comprises 106 RGAA control criteria, including an average of 2.5 tests per criterion.
Some tests refer to implementation techniques (HTML, CSS, JavaScript...) to check that the criterion is met, in order to reduce the margin of interpretation as to compliance with accessibility standards.