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Accessibility: a site everyone can use

An accessible site is one you can read with a magnifier, navigate with a keyboard, listen to with a screen reader, or consult in bright sunlight on a phone. In France this is framed by the RGAA, the national flavour of the international WCAG 2.1 level AA standard — the reference the platform targets. Beyond the legal duty, it is also SEO: what helps a screen reader helps Google.

The work is shared. The site’s shell — its structure, its forms, its planning calendar, its checkout — is handled by the platform. The content you type is yours alone: nobody can guess on your behalf what a photo shows.

What the platform takes care of

  • A properly announced page structure: header, navigation, main content, footer, and a "Skip to main content" link that saves crossing the menu again on every page.
  • End-to-end keyboard navigation: everything clickable is reachable with Tab, activated with Enter or Space, and dismissed with Esc. The planning slots and the calendar buttons are focusable and named.
  • A visible focus indicator on every interactive element, so you know where you are without a mouse.
  • Labelled forms: every field has its label, browser autofill completes name, email and phone, required fields are announced as such, and error messages are read out loud and tied to the offending field.
  • Text that survives 200 % zoom and a narrow screen with no loss of information, and an interface that respects the system’s "reduce motion" setting.
  • Two ways of moving around the site, as the RGAA requires: the menu, and a sitemap page reachable from the footer of every page — it fills itself in as you publish.
  • Links opening a new tab say so, and no page refreshes or scrolls on its own.

What is up to you

Five habits are enough, and they cost only seconds as you type.

  • The alternative text of images. Every file in the media library carries a description field, and it is mandatory: write what the image shows, in one sentence ("Roxana correcting a yoga posture"), not its file name. The field is translated: an image used on a bilingual site has one description per language.
  • Headings in order. In a page, heading levels act as a table of contents: go down one step at a time, never skip a level, and never use bold text in place of a real heading.
  • Explicit links. "Learn more" or "Click here", out of context, mean nothing: a screen reader can list a page’s links one after another. Prefer "See the pricing of ten-session passes".
  • Never colour alone. "The slots in red are full" excludes colour-blind visitors: always back up a colour with a word, an icon or a symbol.
  • Text, not pictures of text. A poster exported as a JPEG is neither readable when zoomed, nor selectable, nor indexable. Rebuild it with blocks.

Your colours: nothing to check

The accent colour picked in your settings dresses the buttons, the links, the focus rings and the highlights. It is picked from a list of six shades — blue, cyan, fuchsia, purple, rose, terracotta — and not from a free colour palette: that is deliberate. Each of the six has been tuned to meet the RGAA contrast thresholds, in the light theme as well as the dark one. Whichever one you settle on, the text stays readable and the buttons stay perceivable. So there is no contrast for you to measure.

The only remaining vigilance on colour is yours: what you write must never rest on colour alone (see above), and a logo or an image you upload is not checked by the platform.

Checking for yourself

  • Put the mouse away and go through a whole page with Tab: the order must follow the reading order, nothing may be unreachable, and you must always see where you are.
  • Zoom to 200 %: nothing may be cut off or overlapped.
  • Run Lighthouse’s "Accessibility" audit, built into Chrome (the tab of the same name in the developer tools): in one minute it catches the most common mistakes on a page you have just written.

An automated tool sees only part of the way: it can tell that an image has no description, not that the description is a poor one. The rest is judged by reading it.