Taking accessibility into account during the development phase

Digital accessibility — a shared responsibility from the development stage onwards

Accessibility is not decided solely at the design stage. It is built at every step of a project — from conception and development through to testing — and every contributor can play a part. This practical guide, written by Coexya’s front-end experts, follows on directly from the white paper “The importance of accessibility from the UX/UI phase” and addresses the topic specifically from the perspective of web and mobile application developers. It draws on the RGAA, WCAG 2.1 and WAI-ARIA standards, as well as development and testing tools including Axe Core, Pa11y, SonarQube, and screen readers such as JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver.

 Five concrete methods for testing accessibility throughout the project

The guide recommends not waiting until the end of a project to test. Five complementary approaches are presented: validating an RGAA checklist for each new page or feature created; testing keyboard-only navigation on predefined user journeys; using screen readers to simulate real conditions; carrying out at least two RGAA audits during the development phase, including one at the midpoint; and testing with people with disabilities, which remains the most reliable method for ensuring a genuinely good user experience.

An operational checklist covering eight areas

The guide provides a checklist that development teams can put to immediate use, covering mandatory page elements (language, title, semantic structure), colours and contrast, images and their text alternatives, tables, forms, keyboard navigation, multimedia content, and consultation rules. The checklist is designed to be validated page by page and feature by feature — it does not replace a full audit, but serves as an effective day-to-day safety net.

A publication by Coexya’s front-end and UX/UI experts:

Guillaume Corbelin, Front-end Developer — Charles Hopfner, Front-end Developer — Murielle Couden, Project Director, Head of UX/UI

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