About 6 billion people use the internet in 2025, or 74% of the world’s population (ITU, 2025). Millions of them browse with a screen reader, with a keyboard only, zoomed in to 200%, or with the sound off. A website that ignores these uses shuts them out, and since June 28, 2025, it can also expose the company behind it to penalties in the European Union.
This article covers what web accessibility involves, the rules in force in 2026 (WCAG 2.2, the European Accessibility Act, France’s RGAA) and the concrete steps to make a website accessible, with a focus on Webflow.
First published in 2021, fully updated on October 5, 2026.
Digital accessibility: why optimize your website?
What is digital accessibility?
An accessible website is one that everyone can perceive, understand and use, with or without a disability, on a computer or on a phone.
The WCAG 2.2 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) organize the rules around four principles. An accessible website must be:
- Perceivable: information and interface components are presented in ways everyone can perceive (contrast, text alternatives for images, captions…).
- Operable: every function works with a keyboard, targets are large enough, and navigation guides the user (headings, descriptive links, visible focus).
- Understandable: content is readable, and the site helps users avoid and correct input mistakes.
- Robust: the code is clean enough to be reliably interpreted by browsers and assistive technologies such as screen readers.
Who does web accessibility concern?
Everyone, but people with disabilities first. According to the WHO, about 1.3 billion people, or 16% of the world’s population, experience significant disability.
Several types of disability can get in the way of browsing:
- visual impairments (blindness, low vision, color blindness);
- hearing impairments;
- motor impairments, which can make a mouse unusable;
- cognitive, attention or learning disabilities.
Older people are concerned too: people aged 65 and over made up 10.3% of the world’s population in 2024, and that share grows every year (UN, World Population Prospects 2024). With age, eyesight, hearing and motor precision decline.
Accessibility also helps in temporary situations: an arm in a cast, a screen in bright sunlight, a video watched without sound on the train. It applies to every device, from desktop to mobile.
Why design an accessible website?
Reach a larger audience
Every accessibility barrier loses visitors, and some of them would have become clients. A contact form that can’t be filled in with a keyboard is a quote request that never arrives.
A matter of fairness
Making pages accessible takes effort, but the web was designed to be universal. When a service only exists online, like booking a train ticket, an inaccessible website shuts some people out of the service itself.
Improve your SEO
Search engine crawlers, and those of AI engines such as ChatGPT or Perplexity, read a page much like a screen reader does: they rely on heading structure, alt text, link labels and transcripts. An accessible website is easier to understand and easier to cite.
These improvements help every visitor: well-contrasted text is easier to read in sunlight, and a bigger button is easier to tap on a phone.
Comply with regulations
Since June 2025, the European Accessibility Act has applied to many private-sector services in the EU, almost regardless of company size.
What the rules say in 2026
WCAG 2.2: the international reference
The WCAG are published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), an initiative of the W3C. The current version is WCAG 2.2, a W3C Recommendation since October 2023. It adds nine success criteria to version 2.1, including minimum target size, focus visibility and accessible authentication.
Each criterion has a level: A (minimum), AA (the level required by most laws and audits) and AAA (the most demanding). A version 3 is being drafted at the W3C, but it is not a standard yet.
European Accessibility Act: the private sector in scope since June 2025
The European Accessibility Act (EU Directive 2019/882) has applied since June 28, 2025, through the national laws of each member state. It covers everyday products and services, including:
- e-commerce;
- consumer banking services;
- passenger transport (information and ticketing);
- electronic communications services;
- e-books and audiovisual media services.
Websites and apps that provide these services to consumers in the EU must be accessible, whatever the size of the company. Only service microenterprises are exempt: fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover or balance sheet below €2 million. Each member state sets its own enforcement authorities and penalties.
RGAA: the French standard
In France, the RGAA (Référentiel général d’amélioration de l’accessibilité) turns these rules into testable criteria. The current version is RGAA 4.1, and the French government has announced an RGAA 5, based on WCAG 2.2, for the end of 2026.
The RGAA applies to public services and, under Article 47 of the French law of February 11, 2005, to companies with more than €250 million in annual revenue in France. They must publish an accessibility statement and a multi-year plan, and display their compliance level on their homepage, or face fines of up to €50,000, which can be renewed.
How to detect accessibility issues on your website
In 2026, 95.9% of the top one million home pages had at least one automatically detectable WCAG failure, with an average of 56 errors per page (WebAIM Million 2026).
Automated tools only catch part of the problems. They find insufficient contrast or an image without alt text, but they can’t tell whether that alt text actually describes the image. A serious audit combines tools and manual testing.
Accessibility score: Lighthouse
Built into Chrome DevTools (Lighthouse tab), Google Lighthouse analyzes a page and gives it an accessibility score out of 100, with recommendations. It is a good first check, not proof of compliance.
Testing a whole domain: Experte
Experte’s accessibility test gives an overview of a whole domain: enter the domain name, and the tool lists the accessibility score of every page it finds. Scores come from Lighthouse.
Spotting errors on the page: WAVE
WAVE, by WebAIM, shows errors directly on the page you test: images without alternatives, form fields without labels, broken heading structure, low contrast. It comes as a web tool and as an extension for Chrome and Firefox.
In-depth audit: axe DevTools
axe DevTools, by Deque, runs inside the browser’s developer tools. Each issue is tied to the relevant WCAG criterion, with an explanation and a suggested fix. The free version is enough for most websites.
Test with a screen reader and a keyboard
No tool replaces real testing. If you only run one test, make it the keyboard test: a few minutes are enough to spot the worst blockers.
- Keyboard only: go through the page with the Tab key. Every link and button must be reachable, in a logical order, with a visible focus.
- With a screen reader: NVDA, free, on Windows, or VoiceOver, built into macOS and iOS. Listening to how the page is announced quickly reveals unnamed buttons, poorly described images and inconsistent headings.
What about accessibility overlays?
Overlays are widgets added to a website that promise to make it compliant automatically. They don’t fix the page’s code and are widely criticized by accessibility experts and disability organizations. In April 2025, the FTC, the US consumer protection agency, ordered overlay vendor accessiBe to pay $1 million and barred it from claiming, without evidence, that its tool makes websites WCAG-compliant. Fixing the website itself is the only path to compliance.
Three levers to make your website accessible
Make your website visually accessible
According to the WHO, at least 2.2 billion people have a near or distance vision impairment. To take them into account:
- Check contrast: at level AA, a ratio of 4.5:1 between text and background, 3:1 for large text. Test it with contrastchecker.com.
- Choose a readable font and a large enough text size.
- Allow zooming up to 200% without losing content or scrolling horizontally.
- Write alt text for every image that carries information, and leave it empty for decorative images.
- Never convey information through color alone (a field in error shown only in red, for example).
To see your website the way a color-blind or visually impaired person does, Chrome DevTools can emulate vision deficiencies (Rendering panel, “Emulate vision deficiencies”). Webflow offers an equivalent tool right in the Designer, covered below.
Make your website accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing people
The WHO estimates that more than 430 million people have disabling hearing loss. To include them:
- Add captions to videos.
- Provide text transcripts of audio and video content.
- Never convey information through sound alone (an audio alert with no visual equivalent).
- Declare the page language so that speech synthesis reads it correctly.
Improve your website’s accessibility with Webflow
Webflow includes several tools for building accessible websites: an audit panel, a vision impairment preview and ARIA attribute management. Some interactions, such as accordions, still need a little code to be fully accessible. Webflow provides copy-paste snippets for them in its accessibility checklist.
Check text contrast
Contrast between text and background is one of the most common issues. Webflow’s built-in audit flags text that doesn’t meet WCAG thresholds, right in the Designer.
See the feature in this tutorial 👇
Go further: controlling the accessibility of your Webflow site’s text.
Preview visual impairments
The Designer’s Vision preview shows the site as a person with a visual impairment sees it: different types of color blindness or blurred vision, for example.
To turn it on: open Canvas settings at the top of the Designer, then pick the impairment in the Vision preview section.
Canvas settings → Vision preview → choose the preview
Vision preview example: Blue Blind
Never forget alt text again
Webflow’s audit panel flags every image without an alt attribute.
Best practice: write an image’s alt text once in the Assets panel, then set each instance of the image to use the asset’s alt text. The text follows the image wherever it’s reused.
Add an aria-label for screen readers
A screen reader announces an element based on its content. When the content isn’t enough (an icon-only button, several “Learn more” links), the aria-label attribute gives it a clear name.
In Webflow: select the element, open the Element settings panel, then Custom attributes → +, and enter aria-label with its value.
Details and examples: improving web accessibility with aria-label.
Large enough targets
WCAG 2.2 sets a minimum target size of 24 × 24 px at level AA for links and buttons (criterion 2.5.8), and recommends 44 × 44 px at level AAA (criterion 2.5.5). Aiming for 44 px makes a website easier to use for people with tremors, as in Parkinson’s disease, and for every mobile user.
In Webflow, enlarge the clickable area with padding on the link, without changing the text size.
And to pick the right element: link vs button in HTML.
Go further with the Webflow Accessibility Checklist
Webflow offers a free Accessibility Checklist. Each item comes with recommendations, simple tutorials and, when needed, code to copy and paste.
The checklist can be shared with a whole team and includes a progress bar to track the project.
Web accessibility FAQ
Does the European Accessibility Act apply to my website?
Yes, if it sells online to consumers in the EU, provides a banking service, books passenger transport, or gives access to an electronic communications service, e-books or audiovisual media. Only service microenterprises (fewer than 10 employees and under €2 million in turnover or balance sheet) are exempt. A brochure website that sells nothing online is, in principle, outside the scope of the directive.
What is the difference between WCAG and RGAA?
The WCAG are the W3C’s international guidelines. The RGAA is the French standard that turns them into criteria and a testing method, and sets out the legal obligations in France (accessibility statement, multi-year plan). RGAA 4.1 is based on WCAG 2.1; the upcoming RGAA 5 will be based on WCAG 2.2.
What compliance level should I aim for?
Level AA. It is the reference level of the RGAA and of the European standard EN 301 549, on which French law and the European Accessibility Act rely. Level AAA is recommended for some criteria, such as target size, but is not required anywhere for a whole website.
Is an accessibility overlay enough to make a website compliant?
No. An overlay adds a layer on top of the page without fixing its code, and does not make a website WCAG-compliant. In 2025 the FTC sanctioned an overlay vendor that claimed otherwise. Compliance comes from fixing the website itself.
Does a Lighthouse score of 100 mean my website is accessible?
No. Lighthouse only tests part of the criteria automatically. A score of 100 is a good sign, but only keyboard testing, screen reader testing and an audit against the WCAG or the RGAA can establish compliance.
