On 4 June 2026, the Judicial Court of Caen handed down a ruling that, despite going largely unnoticed in mainstream media, deserves far closer attention. The French subsidiary of Carrefour was found liable for digital inaccessibility, its website carrefour.fr and its mobile shopping application are unusable by people with visual disabilities. The court gave the retailer six months to remedy the situation, under penalty of a fine of 500 euros for each day of non-compliance.
The story could end there, reduced to a technical note on legal compliance. But there is a detail that makes it far more revealing of where we stand: Carrefour did not dispute its obligation to comply with the law. What it argued, in its defence, was that its level of accessibility - 71% of the criteria set out in the General Framework for Improving Accessibility (RGAA) - was sufficient.
The court disagreed unequivocally. The ruling states: "The e-commerce website in question cannot be merely somewhat accessible, it must be fully accessible."
A Perverse Arithmetic
There is something deeply problematic about the logic of 71%. The association Droit Pluriel, which brought the case jointly with apiDV, captured it with an analogy that is hard to argue against: requiring 100% of the RGAA criteria to be met is like requiring 100% of a staircase's steps to have a handrail. A handrail that only covers the first two-thirds of the staircase protects no one who needs to reach the top.
Applied to other contexts, the absurdity of the 71% logic becomes immediately apparent: would a public building whose wheelchair ramps function 71% of the time be considered accessible? Does a pharmacy that dispenses medication correctly in 71% of cases fulfil its function?
Digital accessibility follows the same logic. For a person with a visual disability using a screen reader with speech synthesis, an unlabelled button, an image without alternative text, or a form that cannot be navigated by keyboard are not minor inconveniences, they are insurmountable barriers. The user cannot "work around" the 29% that fails. They simply cannot use the service.
This reality is all the more serious given that e-commerce represents, for people with visual disabilities, a concrete promise of autonomy. Shopping in a physical supermarket is, in the words of the very associations that brought the case, "a relentless guessing game": finding products in the aisles, identifying prices, locating the checkout, all without assistance from others, is a mission that most stores make impossible. The internet was supposed to be the emancipatory alternative. When that alternative also fails, the isolation is total.
The Legal Framework and Its Weaknesses
The case was brought by the associations apiDV and Droit Pluriel, with legal support from Intérêt à Agir. The European framework for digital accessibility of e-commerce services was reinforced by legislation adopted in 2019, subsequently transposed by Member States. Transposition into French law took place in 2023, with a compliance deadline set for June 2025. Carrefour, a full year after that deadline, was still not in compliance.
What makes the case legally interesting, and politically unstable, is the divergence in outcomes across parallel proceedings. In May 2026, the Judicial Court of Lille ruled on an identical case against Auchan's e-commerce subsidiary and acquitted the company. Not because the website was accessible, it was acknowledged to meet only 41% of the RGAA criteria, but because the court considered that no legal obligation was directly applicable to that specific entity.
Two courts, two similar cases, two opposite outcomes. This jurisprudential divergence is a warning sign. The Lille ruling was immediately challenged by the associations apiDV and Droit Pluriel, who have already appealed to the Court of Appeal of Douai, arguing that the acquittal rests on "a manifestly erroneous interpretation of the legal texts, which clearly contradicts French and European law." The dispute is far from over and its final resolution will have implications for the entire sector.
Some legal experts also caution against treating the Caen ruling as a universal "test case." Carrefour exceeded the 250 million euro threshold set out in Article 47 of the French disability law of 2005, which distinguishes its case from Auchan's. Extending the logic of Caen to smaller companies is not automatic.
The Problem Is Not Only Private
It would be reductive to limit this analysis to the large retail sector. On 2 June 2026, two days before the Caen ruling, a collective of associations representing people with visual disabilities in France announced a class action against the General Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP), due to the persistent inaccessibility of the portal impots.gouv.fr, the official tax return website.
The case is particularly telling: the action was launched in the very days preceding the tax return deadline. For a blind citizen or someone with low vision, the inability to access the portal is not a mere inconvenience, it is an exclusion from the exercise of a civic obligation. And we are not talking about a resource-poor startup or a small local authority: we are talking about the State.
This dual front, private sector and public sector, signals something important: the problem of digital inaccessibility is neither sectoral nor residual. It is systemic.
Carrefour's Response: Too Little, Too Late?
In response to the ruling, Carrefour announced the launch of a "compliance plan" to achieve 100% accessibility by the end of 2026. It also created a "digital accessibility observatory", composed of independent figures, to identify barriers, monitor corrections, and test improvements with real users.
The initiative deserves to be received with neither reflexive cynicism nor premature enthusiasm, but with measured judgement. On the one hand, it is positive that the company finally acknowledges the inadequacy of what it had and moves forward with an oversight mechanism that includes users with disabilities. The company also acknowledges the technical complexity of the problem: the daily updates to an e-commerce website make it difficult to maintain full accessibility in real time. This is a legitimate argument, one that, however, cannot serve as an excuse for inaction.
On the other hand, it is impossible to ignore that these measures come only under judicial compulsion, a full year after the legal deadline expired. The question that inevitably hangs in the air: without the associations' action and without the Caen ruling, would this plan exist?
The chronology of events suggests that these measures would hardly have emerged with the same urgency without judicial pressure.
What this case reveals about us
The Carrefour case is not, at its core, merely about a supermarket website. It is a mirror reflecting the systematic way in which societies treat digital accessibility: as a desirable extra, a good corporate social responsibility practice, a metric to optimise when time and budget allow, but rarely as what it is, under European law and the fundamental principles of equality: a right.
Despite advances in digital transformation, many mobile applications continue to present significant obstacles for people with visual disabilities. From buttons without descriptions to navigation flows incompatible with screen readers, these are barriers that impede access to services that, for many users, are already part of everyday life.
This is not a particularly complex technical problem. The WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) have existed for decades. Automated auditing tools are available and accessible. What is lacking, in most cases, is not knowledge, it is priority.
And priority does not arise from corporate altruism. It arises, as this case demonstrates, when there are real consequences for non-compliance. It is an uncomfortable empirical observation, but it is a fact.
A signal for the rest of Europe
The Caen ruling comes at a specific moment, as we approach the first anniversary of the entry into force of the European Accessibility Act (EAA), which obliges all Member States to ensure that digital products and services are accessible. France is at the forefront of litigation in this area, but what happens in one Member State has direct relevance for the others.
It is no coincidence that the Caen ruling has already been analysed by international digital accessibility experts. Matthew Luken, of Deque Systems - one of the world's leading organisations in this field, - dedicated an article to it, "France's Major Court Decision Supporting Digital Accessibility Under the EAA", highlighting it as a significant milestone for the application of the European Accessibility Act across the Union and noting that the case illustrates how national courts can become the primary enforcement mechanism for rights that regulators have yet to guarantee.
For any company - Portuguese, Spanish, German - operating in the European market that has not yet audited the accessibility of its digital channels, the message from Caen is unambiguous: the legal risk is no longer hypothetical. Disability rights associations are not waiting for regulators to act, they are going directly to the courts. And, as the Caen ruling shows, the courts are ruling in their favour.
Conclusion
When a company with the size and resources of Carrefour argues in court that 71% compliance is sufficient, it is implicitly saying that 29% of the barriers faced by users with visual disabilities are acceptable. That some degree of exclusion is tolerable. That equal access is an aspiration, not an obligation.
The court of Caen answered that it is not. And it was right to do so.
What remains to be seen is whether this ruling will stand as an isolated episode or whether it will mark, in fact, a turning point in the way European companies and institutions approach digital accessibility. For blind people and those with low vision who simply want to do their shopping from home - or file their tax return - with autonomy and dignity, the answer to that question matters far more than any corporate compliance plan.
Sources
Tribunal Judiciaire de Caen - Ordonnance de référé. 4 June 2026.
APIDV - “Décision du Tribunal judiciaire de Lille : une interprétation inquiétante du droit européen de l'accessibilité numérique”. apiDV, 7 May 2026. Available at: https://apidv.org/actualites/decision-du-tribunal-judiciaire-de-lille [Accessed: June 2026]
DROIT PLURIEL - "Mise en demeure des entreprises Auchan, Carrefour, E. Leclerc et Picard Surgelés, de se conformer à leur obligation d'accessibilité numérique pour leurs services de courses en ligne". Droit Pluriel, July 2025.
INTÉRÊT À AGIR - "Une décision majeure pour l'accessibilité numérique !". Intérêt à Agir, 10 June 2026.
HANDICAP.FR - "Accessibilité web : Carrefour condamné par la justice". Handicap.fr, 15 June 2026.
LSA CONSO - "E-commerce : Carrefour a six mois pour rendre son site et son appli accessibles aux malvoyants, Auchan échappe à cette obligation pour l'instant". LSA Conso, 10 June 2026.
FAIRE FACE - "Pour le tribunal judiciaire de Caen, l'accessibilité des sites de e-commerce doit être totale". Faire Face, 11 June 2026.
LUKEN, Matthew - "France's Major Court Decision Supporting Digital Accessibility Under the EAA". Deque Systems, 11 June 2026. Available at: https://www.deque.com/blog/frances-major-court-decision-supporting-digital-accessibility-under-the-eaa/ [Accessed: June 2026]