RGAA: The French Digital Accessibility Framework
If you work on websites for the French market, you'll inevitably run into this acronym. The RGAA (Referentiel General d'Amelioration de l'Accessibilite) is France's technical framework for web accessibility. Published by DINUM, it takes the W3C's WCAG and translates them into concrete, testable criteria for the French context. Think of it as France's accessibility scorecard.
A Brief History
The RGAA has evolved quite a bit over the years:
- 1.0 (2009): the very first version, based on WCAG 1.0 — a decent start
- 2.0 (2009): a quick update the same year, still on WCAG 1.0
- 3.0 (2015): the real overhaul, finally aligned with WCAG 2.0
- 4.0 (2019): new architecture, based on WCAG 2.1 — this is where it got serious
- 4.1 (2021): the current version, with welcome corrections and clarifications
Structure
106 criteria across 13 themes: Images, Frames, Colors, Multimedia, Tables, Links, Scripts, Mandatory Elements, Structuring, Presentation, Forms, Navigation, Consultation. Each criterion is concrete and testable, which is a real advantage over WCAG's sometimes abstract guidelines.
Who Must Comply
State services, local authorities, public institutions, delegated public service organizations, and since the EAA (June 2025), all private companies with more than 10 employees or €2 million turnover. Only micro-enterprises are exempt.
How Compliance Is Calculated
Take a representative sample of pages, test each applicable criterion, calculate the ratio. Fully compliant means 100%, partially compliant is 50-99%, and non-compliant is below 50%. Most French sites unfortunately fall into that last category.
RGAA isn't just a box to check for compliance. Every criterion solves a real problem that real people face every day. It's a practical guide for building websites that work for everyone — and that's genuinely valuable.