Gas, Electricity, Energy - the website of GDF Suez Group

What is accessibility?

According to Tim Berners-Lee, Director of W3C and inventor of the World Wide Web, accessibility means “making the Web''s benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability”.

So an accessible website is one whose content can easily be accessed by all internet users, in particular people who have a disability and who use special browsers.

Accessibility certification

The European Commission is fully committed to accessibility in online electronic services, especially on public European websites. Since 1999, France too has been resolutely committed to this process. The obligation for websites to be accessible was incorporated into French law in February 2005.

In parallel, BrailleNet has been working on web accessibility since 1997, and has established the “AccessiWeb” quality standard. This label is attributed for application of the international recommendations of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) / WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative). It certifies websites as accessible on the basis of 92 specific criteria.

Gaz de France and accessibility

As a responsible energy operator, Gaz de France is fully committed to accessibility on the web and beyond. In particular, the Group pursues an active policy of inclusion for people with disabilities.

In 2007, the Group maximised accessibility on its French version of the website www.gazdefrance.com and obtained the AccessiWeb label, meeting the bronze level accessibility criteria set by BrailleNet.

The French version of the website www.gazdefrance.com thus offers numerous functions and systems to make its content accessible:

• textual alternatives to still and moving images requiring a description: an information bubble appears when the mouse cursor is moved over the graphic;
• textual alternatives to all animations for people who do not have a script or a mouse, and for browsers that cannot run Flash or video content;
• alternatives to hypertext links for people people using text-to-speech systems;
• possibility of mouse-free browsing, using keyboard shortcuts (“Alt + shift” for Internet Explorer, “Alt” on FireFox):
  -  “s”: access the content,
  -  “t”: stop/restart animation (when Flash animation present),
  -  “1”: homepage,
  -  “2”: newsletters,
  -  “3”: site map,
  -  “4”: search engine,
  -  “5”: terminology,
  -  “6”: accessibility,
  -  “7”: contact,
  -  “8”: terms of use,
  -  “0”: link to the list of keyboard shortcuts used on the website.