Twenty years after France’s landmark Disability Act of 2005, and two years after the government pledged that all essential online public services would be fully accessible by 2025, the figures are in — and they make for uncomfortable reading.
France’s own monitoring dashboard, Vos Démarches Essentielles (“Your Essential Online Services”), tracks 244 key administrative procedures against the national accessibility standard, the RGAA — France’s implementation of WCAG. The latest edition, updated in March 2026, reveals that only 16 procedures out of 244 — a mere 6.5% — achieve full compliance. More than half are only partially compliant, and nearly a quarter fail to meet even the minimum threshold of 50%.
For blind users and those relying on screen readers or braille displays, these are not abstract statistics. A compliance rate of 80% does not mean a service is 80% usable. It means that somewhere in the process — a missing form label, an inaccessible interactive component, an error message that is never announced — the procedure becomes impossible to complete. Full compliance, 100%, is the only level at which access can be guaranteed — and even then, only if the audit sample itself is soundly constructed. An audit limited to a site’s showcase pages, rather than the actual forms, confirmation screens and personal account areas that users must navigate, can produce a perfect rate that conceals real barriers exactly where they matter most.
The consequences fall hardest on those who can least afford them. The online income tax return — used by 35 million people — remains non-compliant, with no published compliance rate at all. Parcoursup, the higher education admissions platform used by hundreds of thousands of school leavers every year, is in the same position. So are residence permit applications, which affect migrants and refugees who often face additional language barriers alongside their disability.
The Ministry of National Education is the starkest case: not one of its 24 tracked procedures achieves full compliance. School enrolment, bursary applications, school records — procedures that families with disabled children navigate every year — remain inaccessible. Many of the accessibility statements for these services have long expired, some since 2021. This is not a backlog. It is the absence of any policy whatsoever.
By contrast, bodies in the social protection sector — URSSAF, the family allowances fund CNAF, the pension platform GIP Union Retraite — demonstrate that full compliance is entirely achievable. They have invested in systematic audit programmes and maintain current accessibility statements. The gap between them and the worst performers is structural and deliberate, not a matter of technical difficulty.
France is not alone in this. Across Europe, the Web Accessibility Directive has been transposed into national law, and the deadlines have long passed. But monitoring varies enormously, and self-declared accessibility statements — the backbone of the compliance system — are only as reliable as the audits behind them.
The French dashboard is a useful reference point: its data is public, structured, and regularly updated. Whether comparable monitoring mechanisms exist elsewhere in Europe — and how they compare in granularity and reliability — is a question worth asking. What matters here is what this particular mirror reflects.
Governments make commitments to disabled citizens in conference halls, then quietly let their websites remain out of reach year after year. Accountability requires data. Data requires political will. And political will, in this area as in so many others, requires organised pressure from the people most affected.