Digital accessibility: one year after the law of June 28, 2025, where do companies stand?

A year has passed since the entry into force of the European directive extending digital accessibility obligations to French private companies. The first audit missions are complete, the first accessibility statements have been published, and the first sanctions have been issued. The picture is mixed: real progress among companies that anticipated the changes, and significant work still ahead for those that underestimated the scale of the task. IT Link reviews what its teams have observed in the field this year.

What this first year has truly revealed

Since June 28, 2025, the scope of the General Accessibility Improvement Framework (RGAA) has been significantly expanded, far beyond the public sector to which it previously applied. From now on, any French company with a turnover exceeding 2 million euros or more than 10 employees is subject to this digital accessibility obligation. The affected companies are numerous: e-commerce, online banking services, transport platforms, mobile applications, and more. All offer digital products and services that fall within the scope of this directive and must make their websites and interfaces accessible to all their users.

One year after it came into effect, the landscape is far from uniform! Some French companies anticipated the June 2025 requirement: audits were launched as early as 2024, digital accessibility was integrated into specifications, and teams were trained on RGAA requirements. Their accessibility statements are now published, their annual action plans are underway, and compliance is now managed through continuous improvement. Every new piece of content published remains compliant with the applicable criteria, ensuring sustainable accessibility rather than a static state at a single point in time.

Other companies reacted to the deadline rather than anticipating it. An audit commissioned in a rush in the spring of 2025 revealed the true extent of their technical debt, and the resulting roadmap was frozen for several months to accommodate fixes. Their websites are currently only partially compliant, and their mobile applications are often still being addressed. For these companies, the clearest change concerns how new digital services are designed: accessibility is now part of the requirements from the start, rather than a list of corrections considered after the fact.

A third group has yet to take any concrete action since June 2025. The risk of sanctions, administrative fines, and penalty payments now weighs on budget decisions. It is often the prospect of an audit, rather than conviction, that will trigger the move toward serious accessibility for their websites.

One figure highlights the stakes: in France, more than 14.5 million people live with a disability, representing 28% of the adult population; 80% of these disabilities are invisible. Making a digital service accessible therefore concerns a much wider audience than teams generally imagine. An accessible website or a compliant mobile application is also a more usable service for the elderly, mobile users in difficult situations, or those who navigate without a mouse.

Why are so many French companies still lagging behind since the June 2025 law?

The obstacles observed this year are not due to a lack of willingness from teams. They stem from the very nature of the problem and the fact that digital accessibility has long been perceived as an option, never as a full-fledged accessibility obligation.

Retrofitting an existing interface is structurally more expensive than native design. Modern frameworks have generated years of semantic debt: code overloaded with generic tags, interactive components that cannot be focused via keyboard, and text alternatives that are missing or unusable by assistive technologies. Identifying these problems after the fact sometimes means reworking the foundations rather than the facade. French companies discovering this task in 2026 are realizing the gap between the theoretical compliance they imagined and the technical reality of their websites and web platforms.

In addition to this technical debt, there is an organizational problem. Digital accessibility simultaneously affects designers, developers, project managers, content writers, and those responsible for purchasing third-party components. When responsibility is assigned to no one, the subject does not progress, regardless of the sector, public or private.

"Digital accessibility is not a technical challenge; it is a management issue," observes David Hervé, Director of Solutions Development at IT Link and head of the digital accessibility division. "The designer thinks it's up to the developer to handle it, the developer thinks the design is already validated, and the project manager discovers the problem at the time of the audit." IT Link teams have encountered this pattern in the vast majority of missions conducted over the last 10 years, even before the proclamation of the law of June 25, 2025, both among e-commerce players and organizations offering more traditional online services.

PDF documents and third-party modules constitute another blind spot, often discovered late. The accessibility obligation also extends to downloadable documents and components integrated into platforms, such as electronic payment solutions, mapping tools, or chat widgets. The legal responsibility for the non-compliance of a third-party component lies entirely with the publisher of the main site. Many French companies discovered this during their first audits, realizing that their digital service relied on non-compliant third-party building blocks whose status they were unaware of.

And then there is the question of tools. Automated solutions only detect about 30% of actual non-compliance; the remaining 70% require expert manual analysis, with tests using screen readers and keyboard navigation. Many relied solely on automated tools and published an accessibility statement that does not accurately reflect the true state of their interfaces and websites.

What distinguishes the companies that have moved forward

When faced with a large volume of non-compliance issues, not all companies start on an equal footing regarding this obligation. However, a common thread emerges among those that have successfully transformed regulatory requirements into a manageable project: they did not treat every RGAA criterion as equally important.

Prioritization was based on real-world impact for the user, rather than simple ease of correction. A button that cannot be focused via keyboard in an e-commerce checkout flow or a contact form that is unreadable by a screen reader were addressed before cosmetic contrast adjustments on secondary pages. This logic allowed for the rapid unblocking of critical user journeys without waiting for total accessibility to deliver the first concrete fixes.

"Most companies want 100% compliance before delivering anything," explains David Hervé. "The exact opposite is what should be done. It is better to fix the ten points that truly prevent a user from completing a journey and then progress on the rest throughout the sprints." One example comes up often: a missing alternative text on a payment confirmation image, which is simple to fix, can block an entire purchase for a screen reader user.

Companies that are making progress have also changed the role of digital accessibility in their development cycle. Keyboard or screen reader testing is now part of feature validation, just like regression testing. This avoids the accumulation effect: each new feature remains accessible and compliant from the moment it is delivered, rather than adding to a list of fixes to be addressed later. Many of them have also used this project to structure their Design System and their accessibility best practices guide: a component made accessible once and then reused across all of a brand's websites and mobile apps avoids repeating the same work for every new project. The benefit goes beyond mere regulatory compliance: more semantic and better-structured code generally loads faster and benefits from better SEO, both in France and internationally.

To structure this approach, IT Link offers dedicated support for the accessibility of your websites and applications as part of our Digital Transformation Consulting services. Contact us!

What IT Link observes in its accessibility projects

A pattern appears in almost all the audits conducted this year: the gap between perceived accessibility and actual accessibility. Teams managing a website or application on a daily basis have a fragmented view of its accessibility, built on a few occasional automated checks. A full audit, which adds manual keyboard and screen reader validation, almost always reveals blocking non-compliance issues on paths that no one had identified as problematic.

This discrepancy is due to the very nature of automated tools: they detect markup, contrast, or attribute errors, but cannot evaluate whether a path remains truly usable once the mouse is set aside. This limitation explains why so many companies declared themselves compliant based on an automated score, only to discover during a check or a more in-depth audit that the reality of their site was quite different.

The most critical non-compliance issues are not always found on the most visible pages. A homepage or a product page, which have already been reworked several times, are often in decent shape. It is the secondary paths, rarely touched since they went live, that contain the most significant gaps: customer portals, legacy checkout flows, or account management pages. This changes how an audit is prioritized, as these areas are rarely flagged as high priority.

One year later, the path forward remains to be written

June 2026 marks the end of the tacit grace period. French companies that have not yet begun their accessibility journey face real sanctions, but more importantly, they face a growing lag with every new feature deployed without these constraints. Those that anticipated the change are already reaping the benefits: more robust digital services, better SEO, and an experience accessible to a wider audience, both in France and elsewhere in Europe. The European directive set the framework, and the RGAA details the criteria. What is at stake now is the ability of companies to integrate digital accessibility into their daily operations rather than treating it as a one-off project.

Do your teams need an audit, training, or long-term support? IT Link experts are available to define the next concrete steps with you. Book an appointment with an expert.

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