Accessibility at Meilleurs Agents

Accessibility is everyone’s business

At Meilleurs Agents, our vision is to bring trust in all real estate projects. As many people as possible should be able to benefit from our services. Thus accessibility is a crucial pillar of our platform and its development.

The first step for us was to define accessibility. To do so, we used the definition given by the governmental website numérique.gouv.fr.

Following their definition, web accessibility is about making online services accessible to:

• people with disabilities
• elderly people
• people with a slow Internet connection or limited bandwidth (for instance, people living in rural areas or in developing countries)

To be accessible, a website must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust (https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/).

One might assume that accessibility is product managers and designers’ sole responsibility. They do play a key role in the conception phase of any product. But, like any other complex subject, accessibility is not one person’s job.

Let’s look at a recent example of culture shift: the mobile-first approach. Product designers need to take it into account as early as possible in their ideation phase. Developers also need to have the skills to develop responsive functionalities. Product managers must think of functionalities taking a mobile first approach too. Finally, salespeople use the mobile friendly features as a sales argument.

To sum up, only a collective effort helps to create a mobile-first culture. Why would it be any different when it comes to accessibility?

Why is it important to work on accessibility?

Working on accessibility is important to us for two main reasons:

• it is about ethics and vision
• it is more and more regulated by law

It is about ethics and vision

Whether a person is selling or buying a property, it is an important moment of their life. At Meilleurs Agents, our mission is to help people in their real estate project. To do so, we provide them all the information they might need. We also aim to facilitate the first contact and the following exchanges between real estate agents and individuals.

Ignoring accessibility would be betraying our mission to bring more trust in all real estate projects. Thus, we need all people who might have a real estate project to be able to use our web services.

Improving the accessibility of our products comes down to reaching out more people. Simply put, it helps us to better achieve what we aim to do.

It is regulated by law

Another reason to work on accessibility is that it is regulated by law.

In France, accessibility is a legal obligation for governmental websites for instance. It is an obligation for websites that generate a revenue over 250 million euros. Therefore, many websites do not have choice and have to work on accessibility. Websites such as Boursorama or sncf.com have recently invested to improve their accessibility. For more examples of websites good with accessibility, you can visit Accessiweb. They give a special label to websites passing a certain set of accessible criteria.

Not so long down the line, any high traffic website might have a similar legal obligation to be accessible. Starting to work on accessibility now is the perfect way to avoid some future legal risks.

Our feedback on developing one of our newest product with accessibility in mind

Some will say that working on accessibility early on in a project is expensive. They will say that it does not bring much benefit. We reckon that it is one more thing to consider and pay attention to. Yet, once we started the development phase, we saved a lot of time.

Our recent product ‘Rapport de Vente’ was the first time we got to work on a product from start to finish with accessibility in mind.

At the beginning of the project, i introduced to the team what accessibility is and why it is essential. Parallely, our product designers were getting started with the design system. Our impact team spent some time auditing all the product core functionalities. We then worked on making accessible the different patterns, colors and main actions.

Our first goal was to reach all the criteria to get the French government ‘e-accessible’ label. It is a very good first step to move toward the AA level in the RGAA referential.

We prepared a checklist with the 50 criteria to pass to get that e-accessible label. We used that document to test each criteria one at a time. We listed the issues we detected and created Jira tickets to fix them. We integrated those tickets within our normal Sprint process.

To avoid many ‘basic’ accessibility errors, here are a couple of good practices we adopted:

• To have a coherent and simple markup
• To use <button> elements for all buttons. It improves the user experience of people using screen readers and it is also good for the SEO,
• To use a heading tag for all titles (h1, h2, etc.) and for it to follow a logical hierarchical order.
• To avoid custom form behaviors (such as removing an input element outline or using a placeholder instead of a label)
• To pay attention to the tab order. It is important to have a logical tab order between the different interactive elements on the page to allow keyboard navigation.

Once we were done with the corrections, the company Immoweb (member, like Meilleurs Agents, of the AVIV group) made an audit of our new product. It was very helpful for us to take a step back and receive some feedback from people not involved in the project.

Thanks to Immoweb’s broad experience with accessibility and expertise, we improved greatly. Collaborating with them helped us better understand accessibility norms and how to apply them.

How we intend to go further (working group, training)

We recently created a small working group that gathers twice a month to exchange on various topics related to accessibility. Currently there are five people in this group. It includes frontend developers, product managers and product designers. It is also part of a larger working group within Axel Springer that gathers people from different companies working on accessibility.

The main objectives of our still relatively small working group are:

• To raise awareness of this subject internally
• To put together a process to ensure our compliance with a certain standard
• To organize systematic accessibility audits.
• To train people (in the working group or any other person in the company)

Everyone at Meilleurs Agents is free to join or leave the group. The level of contribution and involvement can vary depending on one’s availability. Again, the main goal of this group is to improve on this complex topic that is accessibility. We also want to support all our impact teams to build user interfaces that are as accessible as possible.

We will definitely keep you updated with how things are going with the group in a future article.

If you have any questions or something to share, don’t hesitate to leave a comment here or on twitter. You can also come to one of our meetups on accessibility (https://www.meetup.com/fr-FR/Paris-Web-Accessibility/).

A huge thanks to Spyros Aspreas and Olivia Coumans for the help on writing and translating this article.