Web Accessibility: Beyond RGAA Compliance, a Business Advantage

In France, the RGAA (Référentiel Général d'Amélioration de l'Accessibilité) translates the international WCAG standard into a concrete audit methodology — 106 criteria in version 4 — with obligations covering public bodies and large private companies, including publication of an accessibility statement and a multi-year plan. The European Accessibility Act extends requirements to a broad range of products and services sold in the EU, from e-commerce to banking and transport. The direction of travel is unambiguous: broader scope, more enforcement.

A significant share of the population lives with visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive impairments — permanent or situational, since a temporary injury, aging eyesight, or bright sunlight on a phone screen create the same barriers. Every barrier is a customer who cannot complete a purchase or a task. Add the overlaps: accessibility practices — semantic markup, meaningful structure, text alternatives, robust performance — align closely with what search engines reward and what all users experience as clarity. Accessibility work is UX work with a legal deadline.

Audit findings are strikingly repetitive: insufficient color contrast, images without meaningful alternatives, forms whose fields have no programmatic labels, keyboard traps and invisible focus, heading structures that read like decoration rather than hierarchy, and custom components — carousels, modals, dropdowns — rebuilt without the semantics native elements provide for free. The pattern matters because it means most of the problem is preventable with standard practices, not exotic expertise.

Remediation campaigns fix a snapshot; only process changes fix the trajectory. The durable approach embeds accessibility at each stage: design reviews that check contrast, focus order, and states before anything is built; an accessible component library so teams inherit correctness rather than reimplementing it; automated checks in CI to catch regressions on the criteria machines can test; and manual audits — including screen reader passes — for the majority of criteria they cannot. Training designers, developers, and content editors on their specific responsibilities costs little and changes output permanently.

Begin with an audit of the highest-traffic user journeys rather than the whole estate. Fix the recurring, high-impact classes of defects first — contrast, labels, keyboard navigation, heading structure — which typically resolve a large share of user-facing barriers. Publish the accessibility statement honestly, gaps included, with a credible plan. Then lock in the gains through the component library and CI checks. Treated this way, compliance stops being a scramble and becomes a byproduct of building well.