Digital accessibility

Digital accessibility means designing digital services that everyone can use, including people with disabilities.

It is neither an option added at the end of a project nor a technical category among others: it is a quality of design, in the same way as performance or security.

Who is concerned

The usual answer, "people with disabilities", greatly understates the subject.

It covers permanent disabilities (visual, hearing, motor, cognitive), temporary situations (a broken arm, an ear infection, fatigue) and circumstantial ones (a screen in sunlight, a noisy environment, a poor connection, one hand occupied). An ageing population widens the scope further.

This is why accessible services improve the experience for everyone: captions are used on public transport, keyboard navigation is preferred by expert users, sufficient contrast helps on poor screens.

Four principles

International standards, WCAG, adopted by the European standard EN 301 549 and the French RGAA, rest on four principles: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.

A matter of organisation

Accessibility rarely fails for lack of technical skill. It fails because nobody owns it, or because it is addressed too late.

A 2026 Cigref study on scaling accessibility in large organisations proposes governance shared between IT, sustainability and compliance functions, with an accountable owner reporting at executive level. Its recommendations: a multi-year trajectory rather than one-off compliance campaigns, integration from project inception, role-specific training for developers, designers, writers and buyers, accessibility by default through the design system, and indicators tracked over time.

Correcting after the fact costs several times more than designing accessibly.

Tools do not do the work

Automated testing detects only a minority of defects, commonly estimated at around a third. The rest requires judgement: whether a text alternative is meaningful, whether a label is clear, whether a journey is coherent, whether the language is plain.

Three practices determine outcomes more than any tool: designing with people concerned rather than for them, writing clearly, and testing with real assistive technologies rather than a validator alone.

Relationship with sustainable IT

Accessibility is the social component of sustainable IT (see Human for IT). It also aligns with sobriety: an accessible service is structured, light, works without the latest browser and remains usable on older hardware, which extends device lifespan.

It stands in direct opposition to deceptive interfaces, which exploit difficulties of comprehension rather than reducing them.

See also

• WCAG · RGAA · Human for IT · Sustainable IT · Ecodesign