A French court told Carrefour that 71% accessible is the same as not accessible. That single sentence is the most useful thing to happen to EAA compliance since the law took effect, because it kills the most common excuse store owners use: we’re working on it, we’re mostly there.
On June 4, 2026, the Tribunal judiciaire de Caen ordered Carrefour France to make carrefour.fr and its mobile app fully accessible to people with disabilities. Six months to comply, with a fine accruing for each day of delay. According to Deque’s report on the decision, Carrefour never disputed being covered by the accessibility obligation. It argued it already met 71% of the criteria in the RGAA, France’s national accessibility standard. The judge’s response, as quoted by the association Droit Pluriel: the e-commerce site “cannot just be somewhat accessible, it must be totally accessible.”
The analogy in the ruling is the one worth remembering. Accessibility is like a handrail on a staircase. Covering 71% of the steps does not make the staircase safe.
Why this ruling matters outside France
The European Accessibility Act is a directive. Each of the 27 EU member states transposed it into its own national law, so enforcement happens country by country. That has made the first year look uneven. It is not.
Level Access’s one-year enforcement review, published June 19, 2026, maps what has actually happened since the June 2025 deadline:
- Germany. Within weeks of the BFSG taking effect, e-commerce operators started receiving private warning letters from law firms. German law lets private parties treat non-compliance as an unfair competition claim, so you do not need a regulator to come after you.
- Sweden. The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority opened its first e-commerce accessibility cases in October 2025, reviewing three things per site: the homepage, a product page, and search. It has logged 124 public complaints, 110 of them about services, mostly online retail.
- Netherlands. The Dutch Consumer and Market Authority (ACM) has sent information requests to e-commerce operators worldwide, including companies headquartered outside the EU that sell to Dutch consumers. Formal enforcement is expected in the second half of 2026. That is now.
The threshold is low. The EAA applies to businesses with 10 or more employees or €2 million or more in annual turnover selling covered products or services to EU consumers. If you ship to Rotterdam from Toronto, the ACM’s mailing list includes you.
What to do: if you take EU orders, find out today whether your business clears the 10-employee or €2 million threshold. If it does, you are in scope, and the country your customer lives in determines which regulator you answer to.
The penalty numbers are already written down
As of mid-2026, Level Access reports no confirmed monetary fines under any EAA-transposed national law. Year one was notices, lawsuits, monitoring, and warning letters. That is how EU enforcement normally starts, and it is not a reason to relax, because the penalty frameworks are already sitting in statute:
- Germany (BFSG): up to €100,000 per violation
- Spain: tiered fines up to €1 million for very serious violations
- Italy: up to €1 million
- Netherlands: up to €900,000 or 10% of annual revenue
- Ireland: the only member state with criminal liability, up to €60,000 and six months’ imprisonment for severe or repeat violations
Fines follow persistent non-compliance, not first violations. Which means the record of what you did after June 2025 is the thing that protects you.
Meanwhile the web is getting less accessible, not more
Here is the part that should worry anyone running a store on a modern stack. The 2026 WebAIM Million report, published March 2026 and based on a February 2026 scan of one million home pages, found accessibility going backwards for the first time in years.
The numbers: 95.9% of home pages had detectable WCAG 2 failures, up from 94.8% in 2025. Average detected errors per page rose to 56.1, a 10.1% increase in one year. Six failure types account for 96% of all errors, and they are the same six they have been for seven years: low contrast text (83.9% of pages), missing image alt text (53.1%), missing form input labels (51%), empty links (46.3%), empty buttons (30.6%), missing document language (13.5%).
E-commerce is worse than average. WebAIM’s category data puts Shopping sites at 71.0 errors per home page, 26.6% above the overall average. By platform, Shopify home pages averaged 75.1 errors, Magento 75.8, and Prestashop 143.2.
WebAIM’s own explanation for the reversal is blunt: pages are getting more complex. The average home page now carries 1,437 elements, a 22.5% jump in a single year, and 133 ARIA attributes, up 27%. Pages using ARIA averaged 59.1 errors versus 42 for pages without it. The report attributes the trend to heavier reliance on third-party frameworks and libraries and to “automated or AI-assisted coding practices.”
Translation: the theme you installed and the AI that wrote your custom section are both adding surface area faster than anyone is testing it.
What to do: start with those six error types. They are the cheapest wins on the board and they cover almost everything an automated scanner will flag. Our e-commerce accessibility checklist for 2026 walks through them in store-specific terms.
US stores are not off the hook either
The EAA is the new story. The ADA is still the bigger volume. UsableNet’s 2026 midyear analysis, published July 8, 2026 and based on filings recorded through June 14, projects roughly 6,176 digital accessibility lawsuits for the year, close to a 20% increase over 2025. E-commerce accounts for 79% of those filings. In the first half of 2026, 68% of sued companies had under $50 million in annual revenue.
UsableNet also reports that lawsuits against companies already running accessibility widgets continue to rise, and that overlay panels often interfere with screen reader navigation rather than helping it. We covered why that shortcut backfires in this breakdown of widget-based compliance claims, and the pattern of small stores getting targeted in our look at accessibility suits against small retailers.
What to actually do in the next 30 days
None of this requires a consultant on retainer. It requires you to stop treating accessibility as a project with an end date.
Run a real scan, not a widget check. Use a free tool like WAVE or axe DevTools on your homepage, a category page, a product page, your cart, and every checkout step. Automated tools catch maybe a third of real barriers, but they will find your contrast and label problems in ten minutes.
Do the keyboard test yourself. Unplug your mouse. Tab through a full purchase from product page to order confirmation. If you get stuck, so does every screen reader user, and that stuck point is exactly what ends up in a legal complaint. The Carrefour and Sweden cases both centred on the same surfaces: homepage, product page, search, checkout.
Publish an accessibility statement with a working complaint channel. Level Access flags a missing statement as one of the easiest enforcement triggers under the EAA. It costs an afternoon.
Audit against EN 301 549, and date the audit. EN 301 549 references WCAG 2.1 Level AA and is the presumptive compliance standard. Level Access notes a new version of EN 301 549 is due in 2026, so build for the standard, not for a snapshot of it. And keep the paperwork. In the EU model, an organization that can show ongoing remediation is in a materially better position than one that cannot.
Watch what your builder and your AI assistant emit. Given WebAIM’s finding that ARIA-heavy pages carry 17 more errors on average, more markup is not more accessible. If a generated component adds twenty ARIA attributes to a dropdown, test it before you ship it. The same discipline that keeps your interaction metrics from sliding applies here.
The takeaway
The Carrefour ruling removed the sliding scale. There is no passing grade at 71%, because a blind customer does not experience 71% of a checkout. They experience a checkout they cannot finish. Every court and regulator moving on this in 2026 is applying that same test, and the WebAIM data says most stores are drifting away from it, not toward it.
Cover every step of the staircase. Then keep covering it, because your theme updates next month.
Sources
- Deque Systems, “France’s major court decision supporting digital accessibility under the EAA,” June 11, 2026 — deque.com
- Level Access, “EAA Enforcement, One Year In: What’s Happened and What Comes Next,” June 19, 2026 — levelaccess.com
- WebAIM, “The WebAIM Million: The 2026 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages,” last updated March 30, 2026 — webaim.org
- UsableNet, “Inside the 2026 Midyear Numbers,” Jason Taylor, July 8, 2026 — blog.usablenet.com
- Droit Pluriel, announcement of the Tribunal judiciaire de Caen decision (apiDV and Droit Pluriel v. Carrefour) — droitpluriel.fr
Last reviewed: July 31, 2026
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