Complete Guide to Digital Accessibility 2025

In 2025, digital accessibility is no longer just a technical issue: it’s a real lever for inclusion, performance, and legal compliance. In Clermont-Ferrand, in the Auvergne region and throughout France, businesses, institutions and associations are increasingly concerned with making their websites and online services accessible.

Digital accessibility now presents a key challenge: to make websites and apps usable by everyone, including people with disabilities. With the evolution of French legislation and the risk of sanctions, compliance with RGAA 4.1 has become a major priority.

At De Bussac Multimédia, we support our clients through accessibility audits and specialized training. This complete guide is designed to help you understand the challenges, obligations, and best practices for 2025.

Digital accessibility consists of designing websites and applications usable by all, regardless of physical, sensory, or cognitive abilities. This approach ensures that a visually impaired person can navigate using a screen reader, that a deaf person can access videos via subtitles, or that a person with motor impairments can use only the keyboard.

This involves, among other things:

• Clear and intuitive navigation,
• Sufficient color contrasts,
• Alternative texts for images,
• Compatibility with screen readers,
• Effective keyboard navigation.

Beyond legal obligations, this approach opens your services up to 12 million French people affected by disability. The Interministerial Digital Directorate (DINUM) and the Federation of the Blind emphasize that accessibility improves the experience for everyone, notably through better-structured content and compatibility with voice assistants.

Since June 28, 2025, the European directive has radically transformed the landscape of digital accessibility in France. Private companies with more than 10 employees or generating more than 2 million euros in turnover must now comply with strict standards. This major extension particularly concerns the banking, e-commerce, transport, audiovisual, and telecommunications sectors.

The regulation imposes three complementary control authorities: the DGCCRF, ARCEP, and ACPR monitor compliance. Micro-enterprises remain exempt from these new requirements. Sanctions can reach 50,000 euros, renewable every six months in the event of persistent non-compliance. This evolution marks a break: digital accessibility becomes a major economic issue for the French private sector. The international WCAG 2.1 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) standards also serve as a global reference.

The RGAA 4.1 (Référentiel Général d’Amélioration de l’Accessibilité – General Accessibility Improvement Framework) constitutes the official French method for evaluating the accessibility of digital services. Based on the international WCAG 2.1 standards, it translates 50 success criteria into 106 measurable and verifiable technical criteria.

Its structure is organized around 13 essential themes: images, frames, colors, multimedia, tables, links, scripts, mandatory elements, structure, presentation, forms, navigation, and consultation. Each criterion offers precise tests with concrete implementation examples. At DBM – De Bussac Multimédia, to apply the RGAA effectively, we start by identifying the representative pages of your site. We then use the official Ara platform, which automates part of the technical verification. Development teams can rely on the RGAA Assistant, a browser extension created by the DINUM, to test their code in real-time.

RGAA compliance is based on 3 possibilities: each criterion is either Conformant, Non-Conformant, or Not Applicable. This strict approach ensures a consistent level of accessibility across all French digital services. A criterion becomes non-applicable when no element on the page is concerned. For example, the criterion on video subtitles does not apply to pages without multimedia content. The final compliance rate is calculated by dividing the number of validated criteria by the total number of applicable criteria, page by page.

The repository specifies 106 compliance criteria, divided into themes:

• Images: provide textual alternatives for images, icons, and graphics.
• Colors and contrasts: ensure good readability, especially for people with low vision or color blindness.
• Multimedia: make videos and sounds accessible (subtitles, audio description, etc.).
• Navigation: allow fluid use with the keyboard, without a mouse.
• Links, forms, and buttons: be clear, explicit, and usable by all.
• Content structuring: correctly hierarchy titles, paragraphs, tables, and lists.
• Compatibility with assistive technologies: ensure that the code and interface are exploitable by screen readers and other tools.

• Perceivable: Information and user interface components must be presented to users in a way they can perceive with all available senses.
• Operable: User interface components and navigation must be operable using all possible modes of interaction.
• Understandable: Information and the operation of the user interface must be intelligible for all users.
• Robust: Content must be sufficiently resilient to be reliably interpreted by a wide variety of user agents.

These four pillars structure all 106 technical criteria of the French repository. Each principle is broken down into specific rules: textual alternatives for perceptibility, keyboard navigation for operability. Technical robustness implies valid HTML code compatible with current and future assistive technologies.

Digital accessibility offers numerous benefits:

• Compliance with the law: avoid sanctions and penalties.
• Inclusion: allow all users to access your services.
• Improved UX (user experience): smoother navigation benefits everyone.
• Better natural referencing (SEO): Google values accessible sites (clear structure, alternative texts, technical performance).
• Brand image: show a responsible and committed company.

At DBM – De Bussac Multimédia, we offer accessibility audits tailored to your project:

• Technical analysis of your website or application,
• Verification of RGAA and WCAG criteria,
• Detailed recommendations for correcting non-conformities.

This audit is essential to identify your weak points and define a clear action plan. The transformation towards accessibility begins from the first mock-ups. Integrate an accessibility referent into each project team to identify critical points before development. This preventive approach avoids costly corrections at the end of the process.

Train your designers on color contrasts and minimum font sizes. Developers must master ARIA attributes and native keyboard navigation. Organize practical workshops with users of assistive technologies to concretely raise awareness among your teams. Establish a schedule for progressive testing: automated checks with each delivery, monthly manual audits, quarterly user tests. This pace ensures continuous skill development and early detection of non-conformities before the final deployment.

Accessible PDF documents require a rigorous semantic structure with appropriate tags for screen readers. Each PDF must include descriptive metadata, a consistent title hierarchy, and textual alternatives for all visual elements. Multimedia content imposes specific requirements since June 2025. Any published video must offer synchronized subtitles and audio description for important visual sequences. Audio files require a complete text transcription accessible via an adjacent link. Adobe Acrobat Pro remains the reference tool for correcting the structure of existing PDFs. The integrated verification tool automatically detects reading order problems and images without description. For content created from Word or LibreOffice, be sure to use native title styles which automatically generate PDF/UA tags upon export.

Digital accessibility is not a constraint, it is a strategic opportunity for your website, your image, and your users. In Auvergne, in Clermont-Ferrand, and throughout France, De Bussac Multimédia supports you through:

• complete accessibility audits,
• customized training,
• continuous support towards RGAA/WCAG compliance.

Contact our agency today to improve your site’s accessibility and turn it into a competitive asset.

Sources and annexed links :

• https://ara.numerique.gouv.fr/
• https://design.numerique.gouv.fr/accessibilite-numerique/
• https://accessibilite.numerique.gouv.fr/
• https://www.monparcourshandicap.gouv.fr/accessibilite-numerique
• https://www.info.gouv.fr/accessibilite/pourquoi-l-accessibilite-comprendre-l-limportance-de-l-accessibilite/abc-de-l-accessibilite