Why Carrefour's 71% Accessibility Defence Failed in Court
In June 2026, a French court handed down the ruling that everyone responsible for a website selling into Europe should read about. Carrefour, one of Europe's largest retailers, argued in court that its e-commerce site and app met 71 per cent of the applicable accessibility criteria. The court's response, in effect, the court rejected Carrefour's argument that 71% conformity was sufficient. The company was given six months to bring its website and app into compliance, with daily penalties applying if it failed to do so.
There's been plenty of coverage of this case, but most of it is written by law firms for other lawyers. This is the plain-English version: what actually happened, why it matters well beyond France, and what it changes about how you should be checking your own site.
The usual caveat applies: we build monitoring software, we're not lawyers, and for decisions about your specific situation you should speak to someone qualified.
What Actually Happened
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is the EU law that, since 28 June 2025, has required a wide range of digital services, including e-commerce, to be accessible to people with disabilities. Within weeks of that deadline, French disability organisations sent formal demands to several major retailers. When responses fell short, they went to court.
The Carrefour case was brought by two of those organisations, apiDV and Droit Pluriel, and decided by the court in Caen on 4 June 2026. Carrefour's defence rested partly on its score against the RGAA, the French government's technical standard for measuring accessibility, which is built on the same international WCAG guidelines used everywhere else. The company's position was, essentially, that meeting 71 per cent of the criteria demonstrated serious effort and substantial accessibility.
The court disagreed on principle, not on arithmetic. The court held that the e-commerce site needed to meet the applicable accessibility requirement, and a company assessing itself against the RGAA needs to meet 100 per cent of the criteria that apply to it. Partial compliance is not a defence, and a good overall impression doesn't offset specific failures. The court gave Carrefour six months to reach full conformity, with daily financial penalties for every day beyond that, and awarded damages to the associations that brought the case.
One more detail worth knowing: a similar case against Auchan was dismissed the month before, but on a technicality about turnover thresholds in French law, and that decision is under appeal. Nobody should read it as a safe harbour.
Why "We're Mostly Compliant" Just Died as a Strategy
If you've ever sat in a meeting where accessibility was discussed as a score ("we're at 80 per cent, that's decent"), this ruling is aimed at you. And to be fair, that framing was understandable: accessibility tools, including ours, report scores, and scores invite the idea that a high number means done.
The court's logic runs the other way, and it's worth internalising because it reflects how the law actually works. Accessibility requirements are individual criteria: this form must be labelled, this image must have a text alternative, this process must work with a keyboard. Each unmet criterion is a barrier that excludes someone. A site that meets 71 per cent of the criteria isn't 71 per cent accessible to a blind user whose checkout journey breaks at an unlabelled button; for that person, it's 0 per cent usable. Courts, it turns out, see it the same way: criterion by criterion, not vibes overall.
The practical consequence is uncomfortable but clarifying. The question is no longer "what's our score?" but "which specific criteria do we fail, on which pages, and when will each one be fixed?" That's a different kind of visibility than most organisations currently have.
Why This Matters Outside France
It's tempting to file this under "French news". We'd suggest not, for a few reasons.
The EAA applies across every EU member state, and it catches businesses based anywhere, including the UK and US, if they sell to EU customers. France has been among the first countries to see significant legal action linked to the EAA. Elsewhere, the machinery is warming up rather than idle:
Germany's market surveillance authority has been following up with companies that self-declared partial compliance
Sweden's regulator opened 28 proactive investigations into e-commerce websites entirely on its own initiative — without waiting for a single complaint
The Netherlands has moved from mandatory self-reporting to active audits
Italy has introduced a formal two-stage enforcement process — an initial cooperative remediation phase with deadlines, followed by formal sanctioning proceedings if shortcomings persist
Different speeds, same direction.
The enforcement model matters too. EAA enforcement is largely complaint-driven, which means any user of your site can start the process, and the French cases show organised disability associations willing to escalate from letters to lawsuits within months. You don't need to be a household name to receive a complaint; you just need a customer who couldn't complete a purchase.
And even if you sell nowhere near the EU, the ruling sets the tone for a global trend. In the US, thousands of website accessibility lawsuits are filed every year, and the Department of Justice's technical standard for government websites takes effect from 2027. The direction everywhere is the same: accessibility is shifting from good intention to an enforceable baseline, and "we were mostly there" is not where you want to be standing when it arrives.
The Myths This Ruling Retires
Three common positions are now much harder to defend.
"We did an accessibility audit last year."
An audit is a snapshot. Sites change with every release, campaign and content update, and accessibility regressions creep in constantly. The Carrefour standard is conformity, not historical effort, and conformity is a property your site either has today or doesn't.
"Our homepage passes."
The court looked at whether real journeys, like finding a product and buying it, actually work. In our experience of scanning whole sites, the worst accessibility problems are rarely on the homepage everyone polishes; they're in checkout flows, account areas, forms and PDFs. A clean homepage score tells you almost nothing about compliance exposure.
"We're at 85 per cent, we're nearly done."
The last criteria are usually the hardest ones, and the ruling says all of them count. A high score is progress worth celebrating internally; it's just not a compliance position.
What to Actually Do
The good news is that the ruling also tells you exactly what a defensible position looks like, and none of it is mysterious.
Know your whole site's position, criterion by criterion. That means auditing every page and template, not a sample of one, and getting the failures into a list with owners and dates rather than a percentage on a slide.
Fix in order of user impact. Purchase and login journeys first, because those are the barriers that generate complaints.
Get the paperwork right. An accessibility statement and a working feedback channel are both expected, and regulators have been using their absence as a reason to look closer.
Respond quickly when someone reports a barrier. A fixed barrier is a support ticket; an ignored one is how the French cases started.
Monitor continuously. Conformity decays with every deploy, and the organisation that spots a regression in days rather than months is the one that stays out of trouble.
If that sounds like a lot of manual work, it's exactly the job we built SiteBeacon for: it checks accessibility across every page of a site, alongside performance and carbon, and keeps checking as the site changes. The Carrefour ruling essentially made page-by-page, criterion-by-criterion visibility a regulatory necessity for anyone selling into Europe, and we'd rather you got that visibility from a dashboard than from a court order.
Our Take
Some rulings matter because of the fine. This one matters because of the principle: a serious, well-resourced retailer made the argument that most organisations are quietly relying on that substantial effort and a decent score are enough and a court rejected it in plain terms. Six months and daily fines concentrate minds, but the lasting effect will be on every governance and compliance team, which now has to answer the question: "Could we defend our current position in court?"
For most organisations, the honest answer today is no, not because they don't care, but because they've never actually measured their whole site against the criteria that apply to them. That's fixable, and fixing it also happens to make your site better for every user, which was always the point.
If you'd like to see where your website genuinely stands, try SiteBeacon or explore the free demo to see the platform in action, with no commitment. Better to identify accessibility barriers early and improve the experience for every visitor.