RGAA (French accessibility framework)

The RGAA is the French framework that turns the international WCAG guidelines into verifiable criteria. Where WCAG states principles, the RGAA sets tests: rather than asking whether content is 'perceivable', you check a numbered criterion, with a written test method and a binary verdict.

What it contains, and what is expected of you

The framework is organised into thirteen themes (images, frames, colours, multimedia, tables, links, scripts, mandatory elements, structure, presentation, forms, navigation, consultation) broken down into around a hundred criteria. Each is compliant, non-compliant or not applicable; there are no half marks.

The obligation that matters in practice is not to be perfect, it is to PUBLISH. An accessibility declaration states the measured compliance rate, the audit date, the non-compliant content, any exemptions claimed and a way to report a defect. An imperfect but honestly declared site is in a better position than a silent one, and that is what a public buyer checks first: whether the page exists, when it is dated, and whether the announced figure looks like anything.

The criterion everyone tries first

The skip link (criterion 12.7) lets keyboard users jump past navigation to reach the content. It is the very first move in a manual audit, before reading a single page. We learned this the hard way: ours existed, was correctly hidden then revealed on focus, and led nowhere on ten pages out of eleven, because the target anchor was missing elsewhere. A dead anchor raises no error; it simply does nothing.

What audio does for your RGAA, and what it does not

An audio version of an article ticks no RGAA criterion on its own. It serves real readers (blind and low-vision, dyslexic, audiences less comfortable with written text), and that is reason enough to offer it. But an audio player that cannot be operated by keyboard, or that screen readers cannot see, ADDS a failure instead of removing one. The right question to ask a vendor is therefore not 'are you RGAA-compliant?', which is meaningless for a component, but 'is your player keyboard-operable, correctly announced, and sufficiently contrasted?'. Our own declaration is published with its method and its gaps.