Accessible landing pages: what RGAA and the European Accessibility Act mean for your conversion rate

On June 28, 2025, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) came into force across all 27 EU member states: since that date, any e-commerce service sold to European consumers — sales landing pages included — must meet digital accessibility requirements, or face penalties. The first lawsuits landed in France as early as November 2025. But reducing accessibility to a regulatory checkbox misses the point: an accessible landing page reaches more visitors, often ranks better on Google, and tends to convert better — for everyone, not just people with disabilities. Here's who's actually affected, what the research says, and the fixes worth prioritizing on a landing page.

RGAA, WCAG, European Accessibility Act: who's actually affected?

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is the international reference standard published by the W3C; RGAA (Référentiel Général d'Amélioration de l'Accessibilité) is its French adaptation, aligned with WCAG 2.1. In France, RGAA has been mandatory for public bodies since 2005 and, since the 2023-859 ordinance, for private companies with more than €250 million in annual revenue in France. The EAA widens the net: since June 28, 2025, any e-commerce service sold to consumers in the European Union must meet accessibility requirements, regardless of the company's size or where it's based — with an exemption for microenterprises (fewer than 10 employees and no more than €2 million in turnover or balance sheet total), an exemption that disappears immediately, with no grace period, once a business grows past those thresholds.

In practice, if you're a coach, a solo creator, or a small agency, you're probably under those thresholds and not legally bound by RGAA — but the EAA's microenterprise exemption only covers services, not products sold online, and it vanishes the moment you outgrow it. The legal obligation is only part of the story anyway: the real stakes are in the market you reach and in conversion itself.

Why it matters even without a legal requirement

• A bigger addressable market — visual, motor, cognitive, or hearing impairments, but also temporary situations: bright sunlight on a phone screen, one hand occupied, an arm in a cast, a slow connection on the go. An accessible landing page works for all of these, not just for the ideal visitor on a fast connection and a large screen.
• Better rankings — accessibility criteria (heading structure, alt text, contrast, semantic HTML) overlap heavily with technical SEO criteria, see below.
• A more robust conversion rate — sufficient contrast, large enough clickable areas, and clear error messages help a visitor rushing on mobile just as much as a visitor with low vision: the same principle covered in our guide to background color choices or to writing a headline that grabs attention.
• Future-proofing your growth — fixing accessibility on a ten-section landing page today costs far less than retrofitting it later, once a business has grown past RGAA's thresholds or lost the EAA's microenterprise exemption.

What the research says about accessibility and search rankings

The link between accessibility and SEO isn't just marketing intuition: a study by Elgharabawy and Ayu, published by IEEE, measured a positive correlation between WCAG conformance and the Webometrics ranking of the sites analyzed, concluding that accessibility can be recommended as a search engine optimization lever (see the study on Google Scholar). More recently, a Finnish study by Laamanen, Ladonlahti, Puupponen and Kärkkäinen, published in 2022 in the journal Universal Access in the Information Society, analyzed the landing pages of 38 higher education institutions against WCAG 2.1 before and after stricter legislation took effect, revealing large gaps between institutions — and confirming that conformance rarely happens without a deliberate effort (see the study on Google Scholar). The common thread: semantic HTML, a consistent heading hierarchy, and well-written alt text serve the screen reader and the search crawler at the same time.

The 10 fixes to prioritize on a landing page

1. Sufficient text/background contrast — a minimum ratio of 4.5:1 for body text and 3:1 for large headings; light gray text on a white background, common in legal disclaimers or fine-print copy, often fails this test. See our guide to background color choices.
2. Alt text on informative images — a testimonial screenshot or a program diagram needs an alt attribute describing its content; a purely decorative image can stay empty (alt="") so it doesn't clutter screen reader navigation.
3. Form labels explicitly tied to their fields, with error messages that don't rely on color alone — a point that ties directly into our guides on multi-step forms and form field count.
4. Full keyboard navigation — every link, button, and field must be reachable with the Tab key, in a logical order, with a visible focus outline; it's also the foundation of good landing page navigation.
5. A logical heading hierarchy — a single H1 per page, then nested H2s and H3s with no level skipped, so the structure makes sense visually and to a screen reader alike.
6. Clickable areas large enough — at least 44 × 44 pixels, especially for a sticky mobile CTA, where a thumb replaces a precise mouse cursor.
7. Controlled video and animation — captions on any video that conveys information, no autoplay with sound, and respect for the system's "reduce motion" preference for visitors sensitive to movement.
8. Explicit link text — a "Click here" or "Learn more" button repeated several times on the page means nothing out of context to a screen reader; prefer wording that describes the action, as covered in our article on CTAs that convert.
9. 200% text zoom without losing content — a visitor with low vision who enlarges text size in their browser shouldn't lose any information or functionality, on mobile included.
10. Urgency and countdowns perceivable beyond sight alone — a purely visual countdown must still make sense to a screen reader; see our guide to urgency and scarcity for the balance between effectiveness and honesty.

The myth that accessibility ruins design

The most common objection: making a page accessible would make it less attractive or less "salesy". In practice, nearly every fix listed above — contrast, heading hierarchy, larger clickable areas, explicit link text — improves the experience for all visitors, not only those using a screen reader or navigating by keyboard. It's the same effect as a curb cut built for a wheelchair and ultimately used by strollers, delivery carts, and rolling suitcases: designing for the most constrained cases benefits every use case, including page load speed, since lightweight, semantic HTML almost always loads faster than a page saturated with unstructured visual elements.

How to test your landing page in 15 minutes

• Chrome DevTools' Lighthouse audit — the "Accessibility" tab, free and built into the browser, gives a first score and a prioritized list of issues.
• The axe DevTools extension — more detailed than Lighthouse on contrast and ARIA structure issues.
• Keyboard-only navigation — unplug the mouse, tab through the whole page: if focus disappears or skips an interactive element, that's a real problem for a visitor who navigates that way.
• A contrast checker like WebAIM's, to quickly test every text/background pair on the page.
• A free screen reader — VoiceOver is built into macOS, NVDA is free on Windows; a few minutes is enough to spot links with no clear label or images with no alternative text.

Accessibility doesn't replace a clear offer or well-crafted copywriting: it widens the audience that can actually reach it. Our 10 LanderKit templates (€89 each, €229 for the full pack) are built on semantic HTML and standard form components, a solid starting point — from there, it's on you to add your own alt text, check your brand's contrast ratios, and test keyboard navigation before publishing, especially on our e-commerce product or SaaS waitlist templates, the ones most directly affected by the European Accessibility Act if you sell to customers in the EU.