Two EAA rulings landed in 2026. Here's what they establish about your website

For most of the last year, the European Accessibility Act has been discussed in the future tense: a deadline that passed on 28 June 2025, a standard nobody had been taken to court over, and a lot of vendor emails about fines that had not actually been issued. That changed in 2026. Two French cases have now been decided, and between them they answer the two questions site owners actually have: am I in scope, and is "mostly accessible" good enough?

What the European Accessibility Act actually requires

The EAA (Directive (EU) 2019/882) has applied since 28 June 2025. For websites and apps, conformance is measured against the harmonised European standard EN 301 549, whose current version incorporates the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 at Level AA. If you have ever scoped an accessibility project against WCAG 2.1 AA, you have already been working to the right target.

The part teams get wrong is scope. The EAA covers services offered to consumers in the EU, and e-commerce is explicitly one of them, alongside banking, transport ticketing, telecoms and audiovisual media. It reaches non-EU businesses: a US or Indian store selling and shipping to EU consumers is generally in scope. The main carve-out is the microenterprise exemption for services, which requires fewer than 10 employees and annual turnover or balance sheet total of no more than €2 million. Both tests, not either.

There is also a transitional provision running to 28 June 2030 for service providers continuing to use certain products lawfully in use before the deadline. It is narrower than most people hope, and it is not a grace period for your website.

Ruling one: Carrefour, and the end of "we're mostly compliant"

Four French disability organisations issued formal legal notices to Auchan, Carrefour, E.Leclerc and Picard on 7 July 2025, then filed emergency injunctions on 12 November 2025 when the responses were judged inadequate. This is worth noting on its own: the first EAA enforcement in Europe came from civil society, not from a regulator running an audit programme.

On 4 June 2026 the judicial court of Caen ruled against Carrefour France over the inaccessibility of its grocery website and mobile app to blind and partially sighted users. The order: six months to bring both into conformance with the RGAA, France's national accessibility framework, a €500 penalty for each day of delay after that, and €10,000 in damages.

Carrefour's defence is the interesting part, because it is the defence almost every mid-sized retailer would give. The company argued, in substance, that it met roughly 71% of the applicable criteria, that this represented genuine and ongoing effort, and that the site was therefore substantially accessible. The court did not accept it. A service assessed against the RGAA has to meet 100% of the criteria that apply to it. Partial conformance is not partial compliance.

It is also the first order in the EAA regime anywhere to cover a mobile app explicitly, which closes off a common assumption that native apps sit outside the perimeter because the standard is usually discussed in web terms.

Ruling two: Auchan, and why scope is decided nationally

The Auchan case was heard in May 2026 and dismissed, and the reasoning matters more than the result. The court accepted that the e-commerce site did not conform to accessibility standards; Auchan did not dispute that. The claim failed because the defendant entity, the group's e-commerce subsidiary, did not exceed a turnover threshold set in French disability law, reported as €250 million.

Do not read that as a general exemption. It is a threshold in one member state's transposition, applied to one corporate entity, and it does not exist in the directive. Two things follow for anyone trading across the EU:

• Your exposure is the union of 27 national laws, not one directive. A structure that is out of scope in France can be squarely in scope in Germany or Ireland, because the thresholds, the enforcement bodies and the sanctions are all set nationally.
• Corporate structure affects who is liable, and not in your favour by default. Auchan's subsidiary happened to fall below a French threshold. The same fact pattern — a small legal entity operating a large consumer-facing site — is how German competition-law warning letters and Irish criminal provisions find a target.

What non-compliance costs, by country

Sanctions are set by each member state, so "the EAA fine" is not a single number. These are the reported headline sanctions in the markets most non-EU sellers reach first. Treat them as the ceiling and the shape of the regime rather than as a price list; national authorities generally act after a notice to comply.

The pattern across all three is that the fine is rarely the expensive part. A court-ordered six-month remediation deadline on a live storefront, a daily penalty accruing while your team argues about sprint capacity, or an order to stop serving a market are all worse outcomes than a one-off administrative fine, and they arrive on someone else's timetable.

A scope test you can run in ten minutes

Work through these in order. Stop at the first one that puts you in scope.

1. Do you offer a covered service to consumers in the EU? E-commerce, banking, transport ticketing, telecoms, e-books and audiovisual media services are covered. Selling to EU consumers from outside the EU counts. Pure B2B services are generally outside the consumer scope, but read the next item before relying on that.
2. Does a customer or partner contract require EN 301 549 anyway? Public-sector buyers and large enterprises increasingly require conformance contractually, which makes the statutory question academic.
3. Do you clear the microenterprise test? Fewer than 10 employees and turnover or balance sheet total of €2 million or less. Fail either half and the exemption is gone. Note that it applies to services; product obligations can persist.
4. Which national laws apply to the entity that operates the site? Identify the member states you actively sell into and check the transposition for each, including thresholds like the French one that decided Auchan. This is the step almost nobody does, and it is the step that decided both 2026 cases.
5. Do you have a published accessibility statement? Several member states require one and treat its absence as a separate, easily proven violation. It is also the cheapest item on this list to fix.

Where to spend the first remediation sprint

If conformance is the target, the sequence still matters, because you cannot fix everything in one release and because the exposure is not evenly distributed across your site. Order the work by the intersection of legal exposure and traffic, not by the number of issues an automated scan reports on each template.

One thing not on that list: an overlay widget. Overlay and toolbar products have been a persistent aggravating factor in US ADA litigation against Shopify stores, and they do not produce conformance against EN 301 549 because they do not fix the underlying markup a screen reader consumes. Nothing in either 2026 French ruling suggests a European court would treat them more kindly.

How this connects to the work you were already doing

The overlap between an accessibility remediation and a competent front-end rebuild is larger than most quotes imply. Semantic markup, real form labels, visible focus states, keyboard operability and sane heading structure are the same things that make a site fast, crawlable and testable. Teams that treat accessibility as a compliance add-on pay for it twice; teams that fold it into a design and development scope generally find that half of it was already in the definition of done.

It is also worth being honest that the conversion argument is real and separate from the legal one. Accessible checkouts convert better for everyone, not only for assistive-technology users, which we have covered in accessibility as a conversion problem. The 2026 rulings just removed the option of treating the whole thing as optional.

Frequently asked questions

Is my website covered by the European Accessibility Act?

If you offer a covered consumer service in the EU, most commonly e-commerce, you are generally in scope, including if you sell into the EU from outside it. The main exemption for services is the microenterprise test: fewer than 10 employees and annual turnover or balance sheet total of no more than 2 million euros. You must meet both halves of that test to qualify. National transpositions add their own thresholds, which is what decided the Auchan case in May 2026.

What standard does the EAA require websites to meet?

Conformance is measured against the harmonised European standard EN 301 549, whose current version incorporates WCAG 2.1 at Level AA. If your team already scopes accessibility work to WCAG 2.1 AA, that is the correct target for EU obligations.

What did the Carrefour accessibility ruling decide?

On 4 June 2026 the Tribunal judiciaire de Caen ordered Carrefour France to bring carrefour.fr and its mobile app into conformance with the RGAA within six months, with a penalty of 500 euros per day of delay after that deadline and 10,000 euros in damages. The court rejected Carrefour's argument that meeting roughly 71% of applicable criteria amounted to substantial accessibility, holding that a service must meet all of the criteria that apply to it.

Why was the case against Auchan dismissed?

The court accepted that Auchan's e-commerce site did not conform to accessibility standards, which Auchan did not dispute. The claim failed on scope: the defendant, the group's e-commerce subsidiary, fell below a turnover threshold in French national disability law reported at 250 million euros. That threshold comes from the French transposition, not from the EAA itself, so it does not transfer to other member states.

What are the penalties for EAA non-compliance?

Sanctions are set nationally, so there is no single EAA fine. Germany's BFSG provides administrative fines of up to 100,000 euros per violation and allows the market-surveillance authority to order a non-compliant service withdrawn from the German market. Ireland provides for up to 60,000 euros and up to 18 months imprisonment for serious non-compliance after a notice to comply. In France, non-compliance is treated as a Class 5 offence and courts can order remediation with daily penalties, as in the Carrefour order.

Does an accessibility overlay make my site EAA compliant?

No. Overlay widgets do not change the underlying markup that assistive technology reads, so they do not produce conformance against EN 301 549. Overlays have been a persistent aggravating factor in US ADA litigation, and nothing in the 2026 French rulings suggests a European court would treat them as a defence.

Where should we start if we are not compliant yet?

Start with the purchase path, because that is the service a court will be asked whether a disabled consumer can complete: product page, cart, checkout, payment and confirmation. Then account creation and login, then search and category filtering, then any native mobile app, then publish an accurate accessibility statement. Order the work by legal exposure and traffic, not by the raw issue count an automated scan reports per template.