digital accessibility, a major societal challenge.
In 2022, over 80% of websites will still be inaccessible to a large proportion of the population. Yoan Fedele, Practice Expert and web integrator at Randstad Digital in France, talks about the need to take accessibility into account when developing websites and applications.
Disability: a digital taboo affecting nearly 12 million people in France.
While visible and permanent disabilities, such as blindness or motor disabilities, are well in mind, we often forget that disabilities can also be invisible and/or temporary:
- a person suffering from one of the forms of Daltonism will be confronted with problems of contrast between text and the background of a web page.
- aging, for example, can lead to ophthalmic or auditory pathologies. As a result, texts that are too small, videos without subtitles or certain radio podcasts are no longer accessible.
- temporary handicaps, such as an arm in plaster, can make it impossible to navigate a website with a mouse.
In France, disability affects around 20% of the population. And in the face of this figure, digital technology, which should serve to promote inclusion, empowerment and simplify procedures, is becoming a vector of exclusion:
- In France, 80 to 90% of websites remain inaccessible.
- The situation for business applications is catastrophic.
- Disabled people remain excluded, sometimes even temporarily, from new media and communication networks.
The cause? The lack of adaptation of sites and applications creates situations of exclusion, despite the existence of many simple solutions. Digital accessibility enables disabled people to perceive, understand, navigate, interact and contribute to digital media, by making them accessible and compatible with assistive technologies.
Digital accessibility: from a social issue to a legal obligation.
Before being a technical issue, digital accessibility is part of an approach based on equality, and constitutes an essential social challenge to guarantee everyone, without discrimination, the same access to information and online services, by removing the barriers they may encounter.
Recently, this challenge has become a legal obligation. It's high time we approached this constraint as an opportunity to develop inclusive and accessible websites and applications.
The main lines of the laws in France:
- In 2005, the French government obliged local authorities and public institutions to make their websites (internet, intranet and extranet) accessible to people with disabilities (article 47 of the February 11, 2005 law).
- In 2016, reform of the 2005 article to extend the legal obligation to certain private players (subject to turnover) and to organizations delegated a public service mission (article 106 of the law for a Digital Republic of 2016).
- In 2019, the decree implementing the previous laws (requirements, implementation, sanctions and monitoring) is published (decree no. 2019-768 of July 24, 2019 on the accessibility of online public communication services to people with disabilities).
As a result, the players concerned are obliged to publish their compliance status (not compliant, partially compliant, compliant) on the home page, the accessibility declaration with the status and level of compliance, and a multi-year accessibility plan, broken down into annual action plans.
How can we make digital technology accessible?
To put it simply, the World Wide Web Consortium launched the Web Accessibility Initiative, which published a set of recommendations for making web content more accessible.
In France, the Interministerial Digital Department (Direction Interministérielle du Numérique - DINUM) has translated these recommendations into a general accessibility improvement reference framework (RGAA). This reference framework contains 106 criteria divided into 13 themes, enabling the accessibility of a website to be assessed.
Here, for example, are just a few of the themes covered: images, colors, links, scripts, forms and navigation.
A disabled person cannot freely choose a site. They are dependent on its accessibility. That's why all future website and application development projects (or upgrades) should incorporate the accessibility dimension, from the initial brief through to the design, development and testing phases.