One year of EAA enforcement, measured in court orders
On June 4, 2026, a French court ordered Carrefour to make its website and mobile app fully accessible to people with disabilities. The company has six months. After that, every day of delay costs money.
Carrefour’s defense is the interesting part. The company told the court it was already 71% compliant.
The judge disagreed. An e-commerce site cannot be somewhat accessible, the ruling says. If you measure yourself against an accessibility standard, you meet 100% of the applicable criteria or you don’t meet the standard. 71% is a failing grade with extra steps.
That one sentence is the most expensive thing a European court has said about digital accessibility so far. Here is why it should land on your desk before it lands in an IT backlog.
A year with zero fines
The European Accessibility Act became enforceable on June 28, 2025. One year in, there is not a single confirmed fine issued under it anywhere in the EU (verified as of June 2026).
GDPR followed the same curve. Regulators spent a quiet first year building capacity, then enforcement arrived all at once, and the companies that had used the quiet year to wait paid consultants at emergency rates.
The quiet year is ending, and France holds the clearest record of how. One dispute, four dates:
July 2025. Four French disability organizations sent formal legal notices to Auchan, Carrefour, E.Leclerc and Picard, demanding their sites and apps be made accessible.
November 2025. The responses were judged insufficient. The organizations filed emergency injunctions, the first EAA lawsuits in Europe.
May 2026. The Auchan case was dismissed on procedural grounds. The court still put on record that Auchan’s site does not meet accessibility standards, and that the company showed a “lack of interest” in the topic. Auchan won the procedure and lost the paper trail.
June 2026. The Carrefour decision. Six months to full compliance, then €500 for every day of delay. That figure sounds survivable until you see the framework around it. French courts can set daily penalties up to €3,000, capped at €300,000, on top of per-infraction fines. Carrefour has since announced a plan to reach 100% compliance by the end of 2026. A court compressed years of postponement into two quarters.
Six months is worth pausing on. In our audit work, some clients have gone from first audit to a passing site in three months. Others needed well over a year. Sometimes the site really was harder. More often the work had no owner inside the company, so it sat between sprints. Carrefour will be covering that same distance with a daily counter running.
The regulators are not waiting either
The French cases came from civil society. The regulators run on a parallel track, and one year in, at least ten national systems are past the paperwork stage.
Sweden started inspecting products and e-commerce in October 2025 and its regulator has received 124 public complaints so far. Those complaints did not come from an agency working through a quota. Each one started with a person who couldn’t finish something on a real website and knew where to report it. That is why EAA enforcement is hard to plan around. An inspection follows a calendar. A complaint follows a frustrated customer.
The Netherlands went further. Since October 2025, companies serving the Dutch market have been required to report their own compliance status to the regulator, and the ones that stayed silent or filed incomplete reports were prioritized for audits in spring 2026. In the Netherlands, doing nothing is itself a signal. The authority has also begun visiting companies in person, bringing along people who use assistive technology to show, on the company’s own service, where it breaks.
Ireland’s communications regulator is processing consumer complaints, including one against Three, the country’s largest mobile operator, which reportedly became responsive once the complaint was formally opened. Ireland is also the one member state where accessibility violations can carry criminal liability, with prison terms of up to 18 months on the books.
Germany has hired roughly 70 accessibility auditors. Separately, German competition law lets private law firms send formal warning letters to non-compliant shops, and the first letters went out within weeks of the law taking effect.
Austria built its enforcement to run without courtrooms. The market surveillance authority can order fixes and ban sales, and it can impose fines of up to €80,000 on its own, no litigation required. The collected fines flow into a national support fund for people with disabilities, so a company that ignores accessibility there ends up financing it anyway.
Denmark’s business authority is running online inspections of e-commerce services, combining automated tools with manual testing and sending companies the findings in guidance letters. In plainer terms, the Danish regulator is browsing shops.
The authorities also talk to each other. In May 2026, regulators from the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Ireland and others met to compare approaches. Finland’s Traficom spells out the logic on its own site: a service that fails the requirements in Finland fails them in every member state, and authorities report their findings to one another. A failure discovered in one market travels to the rest.
One year in, the map looks like this.
Country
Enforcement activity
Current status
France
Litigation brought by disability organizations
First court orders issued, June 2026
Sweden
Product and e-commerce inspections since October 2025
124 public complaints so far
Netherlands
Mandatory compliance self-reporting; information requests sent to operators worldwide
Active enforcement announced for the second half of 2026
Germany
Roughly 70 accessibility auditors hired
Private warning letters circulating
Ireland
Consumer complaints in processing, including against the largest telecom operator
First complaints formally opened
Spain
Court upheld a €90,000 fine against airline Vueling for an inaccessible website
Enforcement predates the EAA deadline
Italy
Enforcing accessibility for large companies since before the deadline, building on a national law from 2004
Consumers, organizations and competitors can all file reports
Austria
Market surveillance with power to fine up to €80,000 without court proceedings
Fully staffed since 2026
Denmark
Online inspections of e-commerce with automated and manual testing
Guidance letters going out
Bulgaria
EAA transposed in April 2025, with КЗП as the enforcement authority
No public complaints yet
Bulgaria’s row is the quietest on the table, and the quiet is worth using. КЗП has the power to order a non-compliant service suspended until it is fixed. For an online shop, a suspended checkout costs more per day than any daily penalty in this article. Nobody has filed the first public complaint yet, which makes this the cheapest moment there will ever be to get ahead of it.
Against that backdrop, one number describes the exposure. One year after the deadline, 93% of top EU websites still fail at least one automated accessibility check. Most of your competitors are not compliant. Neither, statistically, are you.
The most expensive counter in Europe
The sharpest picture of where this is heading comes from Norway, which applies EU accessibility rules through the EEA.
HelsaMi is a patient portal used by about 425,000 people to read medical records and manage care. An inspection found 119 accessibility failures across 12 of 14 legal requirements. The operator was given a deadline. When it passed, 64 issues were still open.
Since December 19, 2025, the operator owes 50,000 kroner, about €4,500, per day until the remaining issues are fixed. A month of “we’ll get to it next quarter” costs roughly €135,000.
This is the steepest ongoing penalty for digital inaccessibility in Europe right now, and it illustrates the mechanism better than any table of maximum fines. A daily penalty turns postponement from a plan into an invoice.
Three questions for your next management meeting
This does not require a project yet. Three answers are enough.
Are we in scope? If you have 10 or more employees or over €2M in turnover and you sell products or services to EU consumers online, the answer is almost certainly yes. Being headquartered outside the EU doesn’t change it.
Who receives the letter? When a complaint, information request or legal notice arrives, someone in your company owns it. If you can’t name that person right now, the answer is you, with a delay.
Has anyone checked? An accessibility statement on your site proves nothing by itself. Carrefour had one, and it said 71%. The way to find out is an audit.
The companies that treated GDPR as someone else’s problem eventually paid the most to fix it fastest. The EAA is running the same script, one year in, right on schedule.
Written by Kalina Boneva, accessibility QA at Access Drum and a screen reader user with 18 years of hands-on experience with assistive technology.
