WCAG

WCAG, for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, are the international web accessibility rules published by the W3C. They are not a law; they are the text that laws cite. The French RGAA is one national translation into testable criteria, and the European Accessibility Act leans on them.

Four principles, and what they cover

Content must be PERCEIVABLE: what is visible needs an equivalent for those who cannot see, what is audible an equivalent for those who cannot hear. OPERABLE: everything doable with a mouse must be doable with a keyboard, and nothing should impose a time limit or a precise gesture. UNDERSTANDABLE: the language is declared, navigation is predictable, input errors are explained. ROBUST: the code is clean enough for assistive technology to make sense of it.

Three levels, and only one that matters

A is the minimum, AAA the exhaustive, AA the one regulations aim at. Level AA is a deliberate compromise: it requires 4.5:1 contrast for body text, captions for recorded content, a visible focus indicator, and resizing to 200% without loss. AAA would demand 7:1 contrast and sign language, which no news site sustains across all its content.

The criteria an audio player actually touches

Four, in practice, and they are concrete. 2.1.1 requires everything to be keyboard-reachable, including a horizontally scrolling region: otherwise the part outside the frame is unreachable without a mouse. 2.2.2 forbids moving content that cannot be stopped. 1.4.3 sets minimum contrast, including for the player's own labels. 2.5.8, more recent, asks for touch targets of at least 24 pixels, unless spacing separates them enough, a nuance that avoids tripling a footer's height for nothing.

Those four can be checked in minutes on any player you are offered. That is a better question than a compliance badge.