On 4 June 2026, the Tribunal judiciaire de Caen told Carrefour something that should reorganize how every EU business thinks about web accessibility: being 71% accessible is not being accessible. The court ordered the retailer to make carrefour.fr and its mobile app fully accessible within six months, with a €500-per-day penalty after the deadline. Not a fine for the past — a clock on the future. This is the first European Accessibility Act ruling of its kind, and the reasoning in it is what matters far more than the number.
This article is educational content, not legal advice. Accessibility obligations depend on your sector, your size, and the member state you operate in — for decisions that turn on those facts, consult a qualified lawyer.
What the court actually decided
The case was brought by two French disability-rights organizations — apiDV and Droit Pluriel — with support from the legal collective Intérêt à Agir. It was part of a wider action begun in November 2025 against four grocery giants: Auchan, Carrefour, E. Leclerc and Picard.
Carrefour's defence was the one almost every company reaches for. It argued that carrefour.fr had reached 71% conformity with the RGAA, France's national accessibility standard aligned with WCAG 2.1 AA, and that this demonstrable progress should be enough.
The court rejected it. Its formulation, in translation, was that an e-commerce site "cannot be only somewhat accessible; it must be totally accessible." Legally, it held that accessibility is an obligation of result, not an obligation of means.
If you read one phrase from this article twice, make it that one. In French law the distinction is sharp and consequential. An obligation of means says: deploy reasonable effort, and if you fall short despite genuine effort, you have discharged your duty. An obligation of result says: the outcome is the duty. Effort is not a defence. Roadmaps are not a defence. A remediation backlog with good velocity is not a defence.
Why "we're making progress" stopped working
For most of the last decade, the practical accessibility posture of a mid-size European company has been a documented improvement plan. Score the site, prioritize the criticals, ship fixes quarterly, publish a statement noting partial conformity, point at the trend line if anyone asks. That posture was reasonable, defensible, and — after Caen — no longer sufficient on its own.
Notice what the ruling did not do. It awarded no damages. It imposed no costs. The court was not interested in punishing Carrefour for the past; it was interested in the site being accessible in the future, and it attached a daily price to the delay. That is a remediation-first enforcement philosophy, and it is far more contagious than a headline fine, because it is cheap for a court to order and easy for the next claimant to request.
Two structural details make this ruling travel further than one French supermarket:
- It covered the mobile app, not just the website. Most accessibility programmes are web-first and treat native apps as a later phase. The EAA does not make that distinction, and now neither does the case law.
- It was brought by associations, not a regulator. You do not need a market-surveillance authority to open a file on you. A disability-rights organization with a lawyer and a screen reader is sufficient, and the emergency-injunction route (référé) is fast.
The other half of the picture: Sweden is doing this systematically
France produced the case law. Sweden is producing the volume. Post- och telestyrelsen (PTS), the Swedish supervisory authority, is running the most systematic EAA market surveillance in the EU: a published supervisory programme that began in 2025 and continues through 2026, targeting online retail across fashion, furniture, electronics, grocery and online pharmacy, with dozens of investigations already opened.
The methodology is worth knowing, because it tells you what a regulator actually looks at when time is limited. PTS reviews three things per site: the homepage, one product page, and the search function. Automated WCAG 2.1 AA checks, plus manual keyboard navigation and screen-reader testing.
That is a gift, strategically. It means the first honest question to ask about your own site is not "what is our overall score" but "can a keyboard-only user land on our homepage, find a product through search, and reach the product page without a mouse?" If the answer is no, you would fail the exact review a real authority is running right now.
Does the EAA even apply to you?
The European Accessibility Act (Directive (EU) 2019/882) has applied since 28 June 2025, and 2026 is the first full year national authorities are supervising against it. It is not a general "all websites" law — the scope is service and product categories, and it matters that you locate yourself correctly.
Covered services include, among others:
- E-commerce — consumer-facing online selling of goods or services
- Consumer banking services
- Electronic communications services and access to audiovisual media services
- Elements of air, bus, rail and waterborne passenger transport services
- E-books and dedicated reading software
The exemption people most often miss: microenterprises providing services are exempt from the accessibility requirements — that is, businesses with fewer than 10 people and annual turnover or balance-sheet total not exceeding €2 million. If you are a four-person agency selling your own consulting, the EAA service obligations do not land on you.
But read the second-order effect before you relax. If you build e-commerce sites for clients who are over that threshold, your exemption is irrelevant — your client is on the hook, and the accessibility of the thing you shipped is the thing being judged. In 2026 that is showing up in contracts. Accessibility has joined SOC 2 and GDPR on enterprise procurement checklists, which means an inaccessible build is increasingly a commercial problem for the builder, not only a legal one for the buyer.
The overlay trap, and why Caen made it worse
There is an entire industry selling a one-line JavaScript snippet that promises automatic accessibility compliance. It does not work, and the regulatory record now says so out loud.
In January 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission announced a $1 million settlement with accessiBe over its marketing of the accessWidget overlay — finalized in April 2025. The FTC's complaint alleged the company falsely advertised that the widget would automatically bring a site into WCAG 2.1 AA conformance, that the widget in fact created accessibility barriers on sites where it was installed, and that accessiBe had presented paid or affiliated content as though it were independent third-party reviews. A related class action reached its payout phase in early 2026 with a $1.2 million fund.
Now layer the Caen reasoning on top. An overlay is, at absolute best, an obligation-of-means artifact: it is evidence that you bought something and pointed it at the problem. The court in Caen said the duty is an obligation of result. A tool that does not produce an accessible outcome does not discharge a duty defined by outcome — and a tool that measurably interferes with screen readers moves you backwards on the exact axis you are being judged on.
Accessibility practitioners and disability organizations have been near-unanimous on this for years. The 2025–26 enforcement record has now caught up with them. If you have an overlay installed and believe it is your compliance story, that is the single most urgent item on this page.
What automated scanning honestly can and cannot do
We build an accessibility scanner, so let us be precise about its limits rather than let you discover them during an audit.
Automated testing — including ours, which runs the open-source axe-core engine used by professional audit firms — reliably detects a minority of WCAG failure types. The commonly cited range is roughly 30–40%, and you should treat any precise universal figure with suspicion, including that one: the true share depends on the ruleset, the page, and how you count. What is not in dispute is the direction. A clean automated report is not a compliant site.
What machines find well:
- Missing alternative text on images
- Insufficient colour contrast
- Missing form labels and unlabeled controls
- Broken heading hierarchy and landmark structure
- Missing language declarations, duplicate IDs, invalid ARIA
What only a human finds:
- Whether alt text is meaningful — "image123.jpg" fails automatically, but "product photo" passes a machine check and still tells a blind shopper nothing
- Whether keyboard focus order matches the visual reading order, and whether focus is ever trapped
- Whether a custom component actually behaves as the role it claims
- Whether an error message is understandable, and whether a multi-step checkout is completable end-to-end with a screen reader
Look at that second list next to the PTS methodology — manual keyboard navigation, screen-reader testing, checkout flows — and the gap is obvious. The regulator is testing the half that automation cannot see. Use a scanner to find the floor fast and cheaply; budget a human review for the ceiling.
What to actually do this quarter
- Establish the real baseline. Scan your live site — homepage, a product page, and the search results page, mirroring what PTS reviews. You want a dated, honest artifact, not a marketing score.
- Do the keyboard walk yourself. Unplug your mouse. Land on the homepage, search for a product, open it, add it to the cart, and complete checkout. Fifteen minutes, no tooling, and it will tell you more about your legal exposure than any dashboard.
- Remove any overlay you are treating as compliance. Keep it only if you have independently verified it does not degrade screen-reader behaviour, and never describe it as your conformance basis.
- Publish an accessibility statement. Under the EAA and EN 301 549 this is an expected artifact, and it is the cheapest credibility you can buy — provided it is honest about known gaps and gives people a route to report problems. Do not claim full conformance you have not verified; an inflated statement is a written admission later.
- Fix in severity order and date every fix. Blockers to completing a transaction first — checkout, search, forms, navigation. Contrast and alt-text sweeps second.
- Book the human audit for what remains. Once automation is exhausted, the remaining failures are the ones a regulator's manual review and a claimant's screen reader are specifically looking for.
The honest framing
It is tempting to read Caen as bad news, and if your plan was to point at a roadmap, it is. But look at what the court actually optimized for. No damages. No costs. Six months and a modest daily penalty. The message to every other company watching was not "you will be destroyed" — it was "the outcome is the obligation, and you have time to reach it if you start."
Meanwhile the underlying case for doing this has never rested on fines. Roughly one in four adults in the EU has some form of disability. An inaccessible checkout is a checkout that rejects paying customers, a keyboard trap is a bounce, and unlabeled form fields fail people using voice control, people on bad connections, and people who are just tired. Accessibility work is the rare compliance category where the compliant version of the product is also the better product.
The businesses that will be fine in 2027 are not the ones with the highest score today. They are the ones who stopped treating accessibility as a percentage and started treating it as a result.
And if the shop you just realized is inaccessible also runs an AI support widget, the same EU compliance wave has a second front: the AI Act's transparency rules became enforceable on August 2, 2026. We cover those separately in our Article 50 guide for small businesses.