France
PDF accessibility in France
- Transposition law
- Loi n° 2023-171 (transposition) and Ordonnance n° 2023-859
- In force since
- 2025-06-28
- Supervising authority
- DGCCRF (market surveillance), with sector regulators including ARCOM; RGAA maintained by DINUM
- Official language(s)
- fr-FR
Enforcement
Enforcement is split by sector, chiefly the DGCCRF (market surveillance) and ARCOM. Sanctions are fixed monetary amounts rather than turnover-based: up to €25,000 for breach of declarative or information obligations and up to €50,000 for substantive non-conformity, renewable every six months if non-compliance persists. Private entities can also face fifth-class contravention fines and daily penalties.
What's specific to France
- France's public-sector accessibility obligation predates the EAA: Article 47 of Loi n° 2005-102 du 11 février 2005.
- The national technical reference is the RGAA (Référentiel général d'amélioration de l'accessibilité), current version 4.1.2, built on WCAG and EN 301 549.
- The 2023 reform (Ordonnance n° 2023-859) extended sanction powers and brought large private enterprises above a turnover threshold under ARCOM oversight.
- French law keeps a distinct public-sector versus private-sector penalty regime rather than a single unified scheme.
- Transitional provisions allow certain pre-existing service contracts to continue until 28 June 2030.
What this means in practice
France is unusual because it had a mature accessibility regime before the EAA arrived: the RGAA and Article 47 already governed public-sector digital accessibility, and the 2023 reform layered the private-sector obligations on top. For an organisation operating in France, that means two things. First, the technical reference you will hear about most is the RGAA, but it is built on WCAG and EN 301 549, so a document that conforms to the EU baseline conforms to what French assessors check. Second, the enforcement split matters: market surveillance sits with the DGCCRF while sector regulators such as ARCOM oversee digital-service obligations, so who evaluates you depends on what you provide. As everywhere, the durable fix is upstream — make your invoice, statement and contract templates produce tagged, correctly ordered PDFs, and keep evidence of what was checked so you can demonstrate conformance rather than assert it.
How Normfluss helps
Normfluss checks your PDFs against the technical criteria that underpin document accessibility — tagging, reading order, alternate text, language, and structure — and issues a signed evidence record of exactly what was tested, in France and across the markets it serves. The evidence describes conformance within a stated scope; it is not a legal determination.