The European Accessibility Act is enforceable now: the audit to run before a legal notice does

On 12 November 2025, two French disability rights organisations, ApiDV and Droit Pluriel, backed by the legal collective Intérêt à Agir, filed an emergency injunction (an assignation en référé) before the tribunal judiciaire, France’s ordinary civil court, against four of France’s largest retailers: Auchan, Carrefour, E.Leclerc, and Picard Surgelés. The claim: their websites and apps were unusable for the roughly two million people in France who are blind or have low vision, closing off ordinary tasks like ordering groceries. The organisations had sent formal notices in July 2025 and given the retailers until 1 September to fix what their testing found. When nothing meaningful changed, they went to court.

These are widely reported as the first lawsuits filed under the European Accessibility Act. The law itself is not new. What changed is that enforcement is no longer theoretical.

What the EAA actually requires, and since when

The European Accessibility Act is Directive (EU) 2019/882. EU member states had until June 2022 to write it into national law. The dates that matter now are the ones that follow: from 28 June 2025, in-scope products and services have to meet the accessibility requirements. A transition period runs to 28 June 2030, but it is narrower than it sounds. It covers specific things already in place before the deadline, chiefly hardware in use and service contracts signed earlier, rather than a blanket reprieve for existing websites. An ongoing consumer service is expected to comply from 2025, which is why the French retailers, whose sites long predate the deadline, are already being held to the standard.

The scope is broad. It covers e-commerce, banking and payment services, ATMs and payment terminals, ticketing and check-in machines, telephony and audiovisual media services, passenger transport information for air, bus, rail, and waterborne travel, e-books, and the computers, operating systems, and smartphones people use to reach all of it. If your organisation sells to or serves consumers in the EU through a website, an app, or a digital service, you are very likely in scope regardless of where the company itself is based.

There is a genuine carve-out: micro-enterprises, defined as fewer than 10 employees and annual turnover or balance sheet under €2 million, are exempt from parts of the obligation. Above that threshold, the exemption does not apply.

The compliance standard is WCAG, wearing an EU label

The EAA does not invent a new accessibility standard. The presumption-of-conformity route runs through EN 301 549, the harmonised European standard, whose current version (v3.2.1) incorporates WCAG 2.1 Level AA in full for web content and extends further into software, documents, and hardware. In practice, meeting WCAG 2.1 AA on your website and apps gets you most of the way to the presumption that you meet the EAA’s legal requirements. A newer version of the standard, EN 301 549 v4.1.1, is expected in 2026 and moves the bar up to WCAG 2.2 AA.

That is the useful part of this law, from a technical standpoint: it did not ask for anything new. The bar was published as a W3C standard years before enforcement began. Since 28 June 2025 the consequence is different: the same gaps that were a quality shortcoming before that date now carry legal exposure.

Enforcement is real, and it is uneven by design

The directive does not set EU-wide fines. Article 30 of the Directive leaves the penalty regime to each member state, so the numbers vary sharply. In France, non-compliance is treated as a Class 5 offence, which for a company means €7,500 per infraction, rising to €15,000 for repeat offences, with a separate €25,000 penalty for failing to publish a required accessibility statement. Germany’s ceiling runs to €100,000 per violation. Spain runs a tiered regime: minor violations up to €30,000, rising to €1,000,000 for the most serious. Ireland goes furthest: alongside fines up to €60,000, violations there can carry a prison sentence of up to 18 months for a service provider that fails to act after being put on notice.

The other thing the France case demonstrates is that fines are not the only mechanism. A civil society organisation with standing does not need to wait for a regulator’s enforcement calendar. It can go straight to court, and a référé, an emergency injunction procedure, moves fast. Most national authorities spent the second half of 2025 building enforcement capacity rather than issuing penalties at volume. That is a slower start than a legal action brought directly by an advocacy group. If your accessibility posture depends on the assumption that regulators are still ramping up, the France case is the reason that assumption does not fully hold.

The audit

None of this requires a specialised assessment to get a first, honest read. The questions below are the ones an accessibility audit runs first, because they are the failures that show up most often and the ones a court filing is most likely to point to.

Question 1: Does your page order start with an H1, not an H4 or H5?

Screen reader users navigate by heading level to skip between sections. A page whose first heading is an H4 or H5, commonly because a component like a navigation menu or footer column title was built with a heading tag chosen for its font size rather than its semantic level, breaks that navigation model before the user reaches the actual content. This is one of the easiest defects to introduce without noticing, because it looks identical to a sighted visitor.

Audit question: Open your site’s rendered HTML and list every heading tag in document order, top to bottom. Does H1 come first, and does the sequence descend without skipping or restarting at a lower level, before the main content begins?

Question 2: Does your body text and your call-to-action button meet 4.5:1 contrast?

WCAG 1.4.3 sets a 4.5:1 contrast ratio for normal text and 3:1 for large text, against its background. Brand colours are the most common failure point, because a brand palette is chosen for how it looks, not for its contrast math, and a primary accent colour that reads fine to most people can still measure under 4.5:1 for white text on a button, or as body copy.

Audit question: Run your primary text colour, your muted/secondary text colour, and your primary button’s text-on-fill combination through a contrast checker. Does every one of them clear 4.5:1 (or 3:1 at large text sizes)?

Question 3: Can every interactive element be reached and activated with a keyboard alone?

Some users cannot use a mouse or touchscreen at all, and rely entirely on keyboard or switch-device navigation. This means every link, button, form field, and custom menu needs a visible focus state and a logical tab order, and no interactive control should exist that a keyboard user cannot reach.

Audit question: Unplug your mouse. Tab through your homepage, your primary navigation, and your most important form. Can you reach and operate everything, and can you always see, visually, which element currently has focus?

Question 4: Are your touch targets big enough to hit reliably?

WCAG 2.5.8 sets a 24×24 CSS pixel minimum for interactive targets, unless enough spacing around a smaller target compensates. This one is a WCAG 2.2 criterion, so the current EAA standard (EN 301 549 v3.2.1, tied to WCAG 2.1) does not strictly require it yet, and the 2026 update to the standard is set to bring it in. It is worth fixing now regardless, because small icon buttons, dense navigation links, and compact footer controls are among the most common real-world barriers on touchscreens, usually because they were sized to the visual weight of their icon or label rather than to the area a finger or an imprecise pointer needs to land in.

Audit question: Measure your smallest interactive elements: icon-only buttons, closely packed navigation links, footer utility controls. Does each clickable area measure at least 24×24 pixels?

Question 5: Does every image carry accurate alt text, and does every form field carry a real label?

Screen readers announce alt text in place of an image and read a form field’s label to identify what it is asking for. A missing alt attribute means the image is either skipped silently or announced by its filename. A form field with a placeholder but no real <label> loses its identifying text the moment the user starts typing, which is exactly when a screen reader user needs to hear it repeated.

Audit question: For your ten most-viewed pages, does every meaningful image have accurate alt text (decorative images can be marked empty, deliberately), and does every form field have a programmatically associated label, not just a placeholder?

Question 6: Does your site respect a user’s reduced-motion preference?

Honouring the operating system’s prefers-reduced-motion setting maps to WCAG 2.3.3, which is a Level AAA criterion and so sits above the strict AA compliance bar. It belongs in any serious audit anyway, because autoplaying carousels, parallax scroll effects, and animated page transitions that ignore the setting can trigger genuine physical symptoms for users with vestibular disorders. The Level A requirement in the same area, WCAG 2.2.2, covers giving users a way to pause, stop, or hide moving and auto-updating content.

Audit question: Turn on “reduce motion” in your OS accessibility settings, then reload your site. Do animations stop or meaningfully reduce, or does the site behave exactly as it did before?

Question 7: Has anyone actually tested your site with a screen reader?

Every question above can be checked with automated tooling or a sighted manual pass. This one cannot. Automated scanners, including the tools most teams already run, catch a real and useful slice of accessibility defects and confidently miss the rest: a form that technically has labels but reads in a confusing order, a modal that traps focus incorrectly, a custom dropdown that announces nothing useful. The gap between “the scanner is clean” and “a blind user can actually complete the task” is exactly where court cases like the French one originate: the retailers’ sites likely passed plenty of automated checks. What failed was real people trying to buy groceries.

Audit question: Has a person using NVDA, JAWS, or VoiceOver, ideally someone who uses a screen reader daily rather than a sighted tester with one turned on, walked through your primary conversion path: browse, add to cart or sign up, checkout or submit? If the honest answer is no, this is the single highest-value next step, ahead of any further automated scanning.

Scoring the audit

Count the questions above where your honest answer holds up.

6 or 7: Your foundation is in good shape. The presumption of EN 301 549 conformity is realistic for you, and the priority is a formal WCAG audit to document that position, plus periodic screen reader testing to catch what automated tools cannot.

4 or 5: Partial compliance. Some of what’s broken is genuinely quick to fix (heading tags, alt text, focus states); some of it, contrast on a brand colour or a component’s touch target sizing, touches design decisions that need a real conversation before you change them site-wide. Fix what’s cheap immediately; scope the rest.

2 or 3: There is meaningful exposure here. If you are a retailer, a bank, a transport provider, or anyone else squarely in the EAA’s named sectors, this is the profile the French case was built against. Prioritise a full audit and a remediation plan that reaches the structural issues, beyond the quick wins.

0 or 1: This is the profile most likely to draw a formal notice if a disability rights organisation or a motivated user tests your site. The cost of a fine, in most member states, is smaller than the cost of the remediation project it forces on a compressed legal timeline. Doing it on your own schedule instead of a court’s is the entire point of running this audit now.

What this is actually about

The France case was not about an obscure technical footnote. It was about people who could not do their weekly grocery shop online, which is about as ordinary and unglamorous a task as digital commerce offers. That is the pattern worth internalising: EAA exposure rarely comes from a dramatic failure. It comes from the accumulation of small, unremarkable defects, a missing label here, an unlabelled icon button there, a heading structure nobody thought about, across a site that otherwise works fine for most visitors most of the time.

The audit above will not replace a full WCAG conformance review, and it is not meant to. What it will do is tell you, honestly and within an afternoon, which of the two positions you are in: the one where a real audit confirms you are in reasonable shape, or the one where you have real work ahead of you and the sooner it starts, the more it happens on your terms rather than a regulator’s or a court’s. (One caveat: this article is general information, not legal advice — confirm how the EAA applies to your specific products and markets with qualified counsel.)

Book a call and we will look at where your site actually stands.

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FAQ

1. What is the European Accessibility Act and when did it take effect?

   The European Accessibility Act is Directive (EU) 2019/882. EU member states had until June 2022 to transpose it into national law. The compliance deadline was 28 June 2025. A transition period runs to 28 June 2030, but it is limited to specific things already in place before the deadline, such as hardware in use and service contracts signed earlier, rather than a general reprieve for existing websites, which are expected to comply from 2025.

2. Which businesses does the EAA apply to?

   The EAA applies to any business offering in-scope digital products or services to consumers in the EU, regardless of where the business itself is established. In-scope sectors include e-commerce, banking and payment services, ATMs and payment terminals, ticketing and check-in machines, telephony and audiovisual media, and passenger transport information across air, bus, rail, and waterborne travel. Micro-enterprises, fewer than 10 employees and under €2 million in annual turnover or balance sheet, are exempt from parts of the obligation.

3. What happened in France in November 2025?

   On 12 November 2025, two French disability rights organisations, ApiDV and Droit Pluriel, supported by the legal collective Intérêt à Agir, filed an emergency injunction (an assignation en référé) before the tribunal judiciaire, France's ordinary civil court, against Auchan, Carrefour, E.Leclerc, and Picard Surgelés. The claim was that the retailers' websites and apps were inaccessible to blind and low-vision users. The organisations had sent formal notices in July 2025 with a deadline of 1 September to fix the issues found in testing; when the retailers did not make meaningful changes, the case went to court. It is widely reported as the first EAA-related lawsuit filed in Europe.

4. Does meeting WCAG 2.1 AA satisfy the EAA?

   The EAA's presumption-of-conformity route runs through EN 301 549, the harmonised European standard, which incorporates WCAG 2.1 Level AA in full for web content and extends further for mobile apps, software, and hardware. Meeting WCAG 2.1 AA on your web and app surfaces gets you most of the way to that presumption, though EN 301 549 has additional requirements beyond web content for non-web software and documents, so a full EAA compliance review checks against EN 301 549 directly rather than WCAG alone.

5. What are the fines for non-compliance?

   The EAA directive leaves penalty rules to each member state (Article 30 of Directive (EU) 2019/882), so fines vary considerably. France treats non-compliance as a Class 5 offence: €7,500 per infraction for a company, €15,000 for repeat offences, plus a separate €25,000 penalty for failing to publish a required accessibility statement. Germany's ceiling is €100,000 per violation. Spain runs a tiered regime: minor violations up to €30,000, rising to €1,000,000 for the most serious. Ireland goes furthest, the one confirmed member state where violations can bring a prison sentence of up to 18 months alongside fines up to €60,000, for a provider that fails to act after formal notice. Beyond fines, authorities in several countries can order products removed from the market or services suspended.

6. Can automated accessibility scanners tell me if I'm compliant?

   Automated scanners are a genuinely useful first pass, and they reliably catch structural issues like missing alt text, contrast ratios, and heading order. What they cannot catch is whether the experience actually works for someone using a screen reader in practice: whether a form reads in a sensible order, whether a custom widget announces its state correctly, whether a modal traps keyboard focus the way it should. A clean scanner report is a starting point, not a conclusion. Manual keyboard and screen reader testing on your primary user flows is what closes that gap.

7. What should I fix first if my site fails most of the audit?

   Start with the fixes that are cheap and carry no design risk: correcting heading tags to the right semantic level, adding missing alt text and form labels, and making sure focus states are visible. These are usually a few days of engineering work with zero visual change. Contrast failures on brand colours and touch-target sizing on existing components take longer, because they can touch design decisions that affect the whole site, so they need a scoped review rather than a quick patch. If you are in one of the EAA's named sectors, e-commerce, banking, transport, ticketing, treat the exposure as a business risk with a deadline, not a backlog item.

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Sources

• Intérêt à Agir: Assignation en référé des entreprises Auchan, Carrefour, E. Leclerc et Picard Surgelés (primary source for the lawsuit)
• European Commission: European Accessibility Act (Directive (EU) 2019/882) (scope and transposition)
• Reed Smith: EU Accessibility Act — What’s the Latest? (compliance dates and micro-enterprise exemption)
• Fieldfisher: Understanding the European Accessibility Act — Risks of Non-Compliance (per-country penalties and enforcement authorities)
• Level Access: Penalties for EAA Non-Compliance (EN 301 549 v3.2.1 / WCAG 2.1 and French penalty detail)