Andy Garcia · freelance dev
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Law & Accessibility

Carrefour Declared Its Site 71% Compliant. A French Court Gave It Six Months to Fix the Rest.

October 19, 2026 7 min read

On June 4, 2026, the summary proceedings judge of the tribunal judiciaire de Caen ordered Carrefour France to comply with the accessibility rules of the French consumer code on carrefour.fr and its Carrefour app. The penalty is €500 a day, and it starts running six months after the order, in early December 2026. According to the associations, Carrefour never disputed that the consumer code applied to it, and the order records that it did not dispute the number at the center of the case either. That number came from its own accessibility statement: 71.21% conformity, measured with the RGAA, France's official accessibility audit method. The judge's answer is the line the French press quoted: the site "cannot be only a little accessible, it must be totally so" (my translation).

A month earlier, on May 5, the Lille court ruled in a case the same two associations, apiDV and Droit Pluriel, had brought against Auchan E-Commerce France. It found Auchan's lack of interest in accessibility "manifest" and dismissed the case anyway: in its reading, no obligation applied, because the subsidiary's average turnover was below €250 million.

Two retailers, two opposite outcomes, one month apart. I am the CTO of a LegalTech company and I ship iOS apps, so I read the orders themselves, which Intérêt à Agir, the association of legal professionals backing the plaintiffs, published. Here is what they decide, what they leave open, and what I would check on any store that sells to French consumers.

Two laws, two thresholds

French law has two accessibility regimes for private websites and apps.

The older one is article 47 of the disability law of February 11, 2005. For private companies, it applies above €250 million of turnover, averaged over the last three closed financial years in France, a threshold set by a 2019 decree. As the Caen order recalls, it has covered those companies' websites since October 1, 2020 and their mobile apps since July 1, 2021. It requires a public accessibility statement and a multi-year compliance plan.

The newer one is the European Accessibility Act, Directive (EU) 2019/882 of April 17, 2019. Among other services, it covers e-commerce services provided to consumers after June 28, 2025: services provided at a distance, through websites and mobile device-based services, with a view to concluding a consumer contract. France transposed it through a law of March 9, 2023, into article L412-13 of the consumer code, with the technical requirements in an order of October 9, 2023. The only size exemption is for companies that provide services, employ fewer than ten people, and have an annual turnover or balance sheet total of no more than €2 million.

The RGAA connects the two. Published by DINUM, the French government's digital agency, version 4 has 106 criteria in 13 themes, from images and colours to forms and navigation, and it is used to assess conformity with the European standard EN 301 549. DINUM says version 5 is due at the end of 2026.

Caen: a presumption Carrefour did not rebut

Carrefour France's turnover is above €250 million, so the court held it was bound by both texts, "imperatively" since June 28, 2025.

The reasoning has three steps. Conformity with EN 301 549 creates a presumption of conformity with the consumer code. That conformity can be assessed with the RGAA. And Carrefour's own statement put it at 71.21%. The order then lists 19 remaining non-conformities, among them form fields with no label, insufficient colour contrast, script-driven elements that cannot be reached with a keyboard, focus that is not visible enough, and content that needs horizontal scrolling in a window 256 pixels wide.

Carrefour argued that accessibility should be judged globally, on whether disabled people can actually use the service, and that the testimonies and screen recordings filed by the associations were not reliable. The court replied that the standard, assessed through the RGAA, "allows and imposes a targeted and complete assessment of each criterion." The presumption can be rebutted, it said, but Carrefour brought no proof to the contrary. Its disproportionate burden argument failed too: the court called those conditions "very restrictive" and found that Carrefour had not justified them here.

The associations had asked for €1,000 a day starting 30 days after the order, a suspension of the site and app until they complied, €50,000 in provisional damages and publication of the order on Carrefour's homepage. They got €500 a day after six months, €10,000 in provisional damages and €3,000 toward legal costs. Suspension was "entirely disproportionate," because it would block every other customer. Publication was refused.

Carrefour told LSA, a French retail trade publication, in an article published on June 10, that it was examining the decision and reserved the right to appeal. It added that daily updates to the site sometimes make total, real-time accessibility difficult, and said it had launched a plan to reach 100% by the end of 2026.

Lille: a worse site, no obligation

The Lille order is not kind to Auchan either. According to Auchan's own accessibility statement, 13 of the 19 sections of its site had non-conformities with a "strong to major" impact. The app carried no accessibility information, and an audit commissioned by Auchan in October 2023 found a "rather low" general level.

The case turned on three words. Article L412-13 applies "sans préjudice des articles 47 et 48" of the 2005 law: without prejudice to them. For the Lille judge, that means the consumer code does not set aside article 47, so its €250 million threshold "must be taken into consideration." Auchan E-Commerce France's average turnover was below it, so there was no flagrant breach of a rule of law and no ground for a summary order. The non-discrimination argument fell for the same reason.

The associations call this a manifestly wrong reading that deprives the directive of any useful effect, and have taken it to the Douai court of appeal. Simon Parier, a lawyer writing in Village Justice, adds a practical objection: under that reading, running an online store through a subsidiary below the threshold would be enough to escape the text.

What the two orders do not show

They do not contradict each other on the threshold. Carrefour is above €250 million, so Caen never had to decide whether the consumer code applies below it. Parier warns against treating Caen as a precedent on that point.

Both are summary orders. As Parier notes about Lille, a court ruling on the merits can read the texts differently. The associations also sued E.Leclerc and Picard Surgelés, and LSA reported in June that the E.Leclerc case would be heard in Créteil on September 22. When I read their case page on October 19, it listed no decision after Caen, and I found no published ruling from Douai.

And neither court wrote "100% of RGAA criteria." That phrase comes from the associations, in their claims in Lille and their release on Caen. The Caen order says "totally" accessible, and rests on a presumption a company can, in theory, rebut.

The arithmetic of 71%

The RGAA allows a statement to publish one of two rates: the average of each page's score, or the share of criteria met. The second divides validated criteria by applicable criteria, and a criterion is validated only if it passes on every page of the audit sample. One failing element on one page fails the criterion for the whole site. Under the RGAA's own labels, anything from 50% up to just short of 100% is "partial conformity."

The order says neither which rate 71.21% is nor what it was computed on, but the numbers fit one reading. Nineteen failing criteria out of 66 applicable leaves 47 passed, and 47 divided by 66 is 71.21%, the only split with 106 criteria or fewer that gives that figure. If that is the split, 71% does not mean 71% of the site works. It means 19 kinds of barrier exist somewhere in the sample, unlabelled form fields and elements a keyboard cannot reach included, on a site where checkout is a sequence of forms.

The penalty is modest for a group that size: €500 a day is €15,000 per 30 days, or €182,500 a year. The money is not the point. The reading is.

What I would check on a French online store

First, scope. If you sell to consumers through a site or an app and you employ ten people or more, or have both turnover and balance sheet above €2 million, the consumer code's text covers you. I would not build on Lille's €250 million reading. It is a summary order, on appeal.

Second, read your own accessibility statement as opposing counsel would. Both courts worked from the retailers' own documents.

Third, test the path that makes money: search, product page, basket, login and checkout, with a keyboard and a screen reader. Some RGAA criteria require tests with assistive technologies, so a scanner alone cannot certify "totally."

Fourth, put accessibility in the release process. The directive requires service providers to have procedures so the service remains in conformity. Carrefour's own point about daily updates is the reason.

Fifth, do not count on disproportionate burden. The directive's recitals say that "lack of priority, time or knowledge should not be considered to be legitimate reasons," and Caen rejected the argument.

Finally, do not wait for RGAA 5. DINUM says ongoing work must in no case be suspended or postponed.

Seventy-one percent is a progress bar. In Caen, it was also an exhibit.

Sources

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