What the French retail accessibility lawsuits tell us about EU enforcement

In July 2025 the French associations ApiDV and Droit Pluriel formally put four major retail chains on notice over inaccessible e-commerce, then took them to court. The complaint: websites and apps that fail screen readers, break keyboard navigation and lock blind customers out of services such as click & collect. On 4 June 2026 the tribunal judiciaire de Caen ruled against Carrefour. Sitting in référé — summary proceedings, decided quickly and without a full trial on the merits — the court ordered Carrefour France to make carrefour.fr and its mobile app fully accessible within six months and set an astreinte of €500 per day should that deadline pass. Carrefour argued it already met 71% of the accessibility criteria. The court rejected that outright: an e-commerce service cannot be somewhat accessible, it must be accessible. Accessibility is an obligation of result. The legal ground matters more than the numbers. The court decided on Article L.412-13 of the French Consumer Code — the provision that transposes Directive (EU) 2019/882, the European Accessibility Act, into French law. France wrote it into the Consumer Code in 2023 with compliance required from 28 June 2025, so these actions came a year after the deadline, not on day one. This is the EAA being applied to a private online retailer by a national court, not a policy discussion about what the EAA might one day mean. Be precise about what did and did not happen. Carrefour was not fined. An astreinte is forward-looking: it starts running only if the six-month deadline passes without compliance, so it penalises future inaction, not past conduct. As of July 2026 no company anywhere in the EU has been fined under an EAA-transposed law. Nor is this the last word — a référé order is interim relief, not a final judgment on the merits, and Carrefour said it was reviewing the decision and reserved its right to appeal. What exists today is an injunction with a deadline and a meter attached, which for a business planning its roadmap is the more useful signal anyway. A second case went the other way, and it is worth understanding why it does not narrow the EAA. On 5 May 2026 the tribunal judiciaire de Lille dismissed the same associations' claim against Auchan E-Commerce France. The court did not find the site accessible — Auchan did not contest that it was not. It held that the obligation did not reach that subsidiary, reading Article L.412-13 as preserving the €250M revenue threshold from Articles 47–48 of the French disability law of 11 February 2005; Auchan E-Commerce's revenue was around €144M. That reading is substantive, contested, and now before the Cour d'appel de Douai. Do not read the Lille decision as an EAA exemption threshold. The EAA's own carve-out is far narrower: microenterprises, meaning fewer than 10 employees AND under €2M annual turnover, and even then only for their services — products covered by the EAA must comply regardless of company size. The €250M figure comes from an older French statute and from one first-instance reading of how the two interact. The Caen court, on the same article, reached the opposite conclusion. Nothing about “under €250M” means exempt, in France or anywhere else in the EU. For an e-shop the practical takeaway is unchanged by either ruling. Enforcement in France is now judicial and fast: référé proceedings, a six-month deadline, a daily meter. Partial conformity is not a defence — 71% was not enough. A baseline scan takes minutes and tells you where you actually stand; fixing the critical issues takes weeks. Start before a court or a disability-rights organisation sets your deadline for you.