Two French courts, one month apart, reached opposite conclusions on web accessibility

EAA Comply · Published 27 July 2026 · 9 min read

If you run an online shop in Europe and you are trying to work out how much legal exposure you actually have under the European Accessibility Act, the first half of 2026 gave you two data points that point in opposite directions. Both came from French first-instance courts. Both involved the same two claimant associations. They were decided four weeks apart, and they disagree.

This article sets out what each court decided, why the difference matters, and — just as importantly — what it does not prove. We sell accessibility audits, so we have an obvious commercial interest in making this sound scarier than it is. We would rather you had the accurate version.

4 June 2026, Caen: Carrefour ordered to make its site and app fully accessible

The Tribunal judiciaire de Caen ruled in favour of the associations apiDV and Droit Pluriel against Carrefour France. The court ordered Carrefour to make both carrefour.fr and the Carrefour mobile application fully accessible within six months, backed by an astreinte — a penalty payment that accrues for each day of delay past the deadline. Procedurally this was a référé: an expedited interim procedure, not a full trial on the merits. That matters for how much weight the decision carries, and it is why neither of these rulings has been published on Légifrance.

The most quotable part of the decision is not the deadline. It is what the court did with Carrefour's defence. Carrefour argued that its site already met roughly 71 % of the applicable French RGAA criteria. The court rejected that as a defence: a site cannot be partly accessible and call it done. Coverage of the ruling describes it as treating accessibility as an obligation de résultat — an obligation to achieve the outcome, not merely to make a reasonable effort towards it.

The legal basis was Article 47 of the French law of 11 February 2005, which applies to private companies above €250 million in annual revenue, alongside the Consumer Code provisions that transpose Directive (EU) 2019/882. Carrefour has said it reserves the right to appeal and has announced a plan targeting full conformance by the end of 2026.

What this ruling is not: Carrefour was not fined. It was ordered to fix its site within six months, with a financial penalty only if it fails to. Anyone telling you "Carrefour was fined for accessibility" is selling you something. The daily penalty is reported as €500 for each day of delay once the six months run out, by the disability magazine Faire Face. We have not found that figure in a second independent outlet, and the decision itself is not public, so treat it as well-sourced rather than certain.

Early May 2026, Lille: the same associations lost against Auchan

Four weeks earlier, the Tribunal judiciaire de Lille — also sitting in référé — dismissed the associations' claims against Auchan E-Commerce France entirely. You will see this decision dated both 5 and 6 May depending on the source; the order is dated 5 May and was handed down the following day.

What makes the decision striking is that the court did not disagree about the facts. It accepted that the site and app were inaccessible, with strong or major non-conformities in 13 of the 19 categories tested. It dismissed the case on scope. Auchan E-Commerce France, as a legal entity, fell below the €250 million revenue threshold in Article 47 of the 2005 law. The filed accounts put that subsidiary at roughly €144 million of turnover in 2024, down from €182 million in 2023 — comfortably under the line, even though the Auchan group as a whole is many times above it.

The associations argued that Article L.412-13 of the Consumer Code — the EAA transposition, applicable since 28 June 2025 — creates a separate obligation that bites at a much lower threshold. The court read the phrase sans préjudice ("without prejudice") in that provision as preserving the older, higher threshold rather than adding a new lower one. The associations have appealed to the Cour d’appel de Douai. No appellate ruling had been published when we wrote this, and an arrêt arriving this quickly would be unusual.

French practitioners have criticised the reasoning sharply, on the basis that it would let a large group escape accessibility obligations by placing its e-commerce operation in a subsidiary that sits below the threshold. That criticism may well succeed on appeal. It has not yet.

Both cases come out of one campaign against four retailers

Neither ruling was an isolated complaint. On 7 July 2025 — nine days after the European Accessibility Act's private-sector obligations took effect in France — apiDV and Droit Pluriel, supported by the legal collective Intérêt à Agir, served formal notices (mises en demeure) on four grocery retailers: Auchan, Carrefour, E. Leclerc and Picard Surgelés. Carrefour and E. Leclerc were put on notice over their websites; Auchan and Picard over their websites and their mobile apps. The notices set a compliance deadline of 1 September 2025. When it passed, the associations issued assignations en référé against all four in November 2025.

So the two decisions above are two of four. We have not found any published outcome for the E. Leclerc or Picard cases, and we are not going to guess at one. The practical read is that this is an organised, repeatable strategy rather than a one-off, and that the same associations can run it against any sector where the accessibility gap is easy to document.

Why an unresolved contradiction is still useful information

The honest summary of French law right now is: unsettled. Two first-instance courts, one month apart, split on whether the EAA transposition creates an obligation below the historic revenue threshold. One appeal is pending. Neither decision binds the other.

That is genuinely less dramatic than "the fines have started." But it tells you three things that are worth acting on.

What has not happened

We looked for it specifically, in five languages, and we want to be plain about the result: as far as any public record shows, no national market surveillance authority in any EU member state has publicly imposed a fine on a named company under the European Accessibility Act. Every "fines of up to €X in country Y" figure circulating online is a statutory maximum written into a national law, not a penalty anybody has actually paid.

Regulators are, however, visibly building the machinery. In France, Arcom issued a formal notice (mise en demeure) on 24 June 2026 requiring the Ministry of Public Action and Accounts to bring impots.gouv.fr into compliance — a real regulatory act, though it concerns the public sector under the Web Accessibility Directive rather than the EAA. Germany's joint market surveillance body for accessibility, the MLBF, has been operational since September 2025 and adopted its surveillance strategies in January 2026. Spain created a technical coordination unit for its surveillance authorities by Royal Decree 143/2026, in force since 28 February 2026, with an explicit remit to collect information on infringements and sanctions.

None of that is a fine. All of it is the apparatus that issues them.

One correction worth making, because we see it stated the wrong way round constantly: in France, Arcom is not the authority for private e-commerce. Arcom's accessibility remit runs to the public sector and to private companies above the €250 million threshold of the 2005 law. For ordinary online shops, the competent authority under the EAA transposition is the DGCCRF, the consumer-protection and fraud-control directorate. On 25 June 2026 it published a one-year review of its own activity: 38 rail-sector establishments inspected between April 2025 and March 2026, three further investigations opened since January 2026 — one of them covering e-commerce sites and apps, and, notably, the practices of accessibility audit firms — and around a hundred establishments targeted across 2026. The DGCCRF also publicised a dedicated accessibility reporting route through SignalConso, its consumer complaints platform, in December 2025.

That last detail is worth sitting with if you are shopping for an auditor. The regulator has said out loud that it is looking at how accessibility audits are sold, not only at the sites being audited. An audit that overstates your conformance is now a liability for both parties.

What we would do if it were our shop

Get an accurate picture of where you stand, in writing, before somebody else produces one for you. A real audit tells you which barriers are blocking a purchase — keyboard traps in checkout, unlabelled buttons, form fields with no programmatic name — and which are cosmetic. That distinction is what lets you fix the things that matter first, on your own schedule, instead of on a court's.

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