When I use a website with a screen reader, I do not experience it as a collection of individual accessibility criteria. I experience a journey. Can I find the product I want, understand the information, choose a delivery slot, enter my payment details and complete the purchase without asking someone else for help?

If the answer is no, the service is not accessible to me. A percentage in an audit report does not change that experience.

That is why a recent court decision in France matters far beyond one retailer or one country. It draws attention to something organisations too often forget: accessibility is ultimately judged by what people with disabilities can do, not merely by how many boxes have been ticked.

What happened in France?

On 4 June 2026, the Tribunal judiciaire de Caen ordered Carrefour France to make its online shopping services fully accessible to people with disabilities. The order covers both the Carrefour website and mobile application.

Carrefour was given six months to comply. If it fails to do so, the company faces a financial penalty of €500 for each day of further delay.

According to the French disability rights organisation Droit Pluriel, Carrefour did not dispute that it was subject to accessibility obligations under the French Consumer Code. The company reportedly argued that it already met 71% of the relevant accessibility criteria.

The court was not persuaded that partial accessibility was enough. As Droit Pluriel reported:

“The e-commerce site in question cannot just be somewhat accessible, it must be totally accessible.”

The ruling arrives as organisations adjust to the European Accessibility Act, which became applicable across the European Union on 28 June 2025. Although this case was decided through France’s national legal framework, it offers an early indication of how accessibility obligations may be enforced in practice.

Accessibility is an outcome

The most important detail is not the 71% figure. It is what remained inside the other 29%.

Accessibility defects are not equal in their effect. One missing label might create a moment of confusion. Another could prevent a screen reader user from selecting a delivery address. A poorly implemented control could make it impossible to choose a payment method or submit an order.

A customer can get almost all the way through a journey and still leave with nothing. From an audit perspective, the website might appear to be making good progress. From the customer’s perspective, it has failed completely.

This is particularly clear with online grocery shopping. Droit Pluriel describes the practical barriers blind and partially sighted people can encounter in a physical supermarket, including finding products, identifying prices and reaching the checkout without assistance. Online shopping should offer greater independence, but that promise depends on the whole service working.

An accessible homepage does not help if product filters cannot be operated with a keyboard. Clear product descriptions do not help if the basket is not announced correctly by a screen reader. An accessible checkout is of little value if the customer cannot select a delivery slot.

Accessibility has to survive the whole journey.

Standards still matter

This is not an argument against technical standards or accessibility audits. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, commonly known as WCAG, give organisations an essential framework for identifying and preventing barriers. France’s Référentiel général d’amélioration de l’accessibilité, or RGAA, provides a technical method for assessing accessibility against defined requirements.

Without standards, accessibility becomes subjective and inconsistent. Without testing, organisations cannot identify defects reliably or track whether they have fixed them.

But conformance is a means, not the customer outcome. A report can tell you whether an image has alternative text, but it may not tell you whether that description helps a blind customer distinguish between two similar products. An automated tool can identify an input without a label, but it cannot reliably tell you whether the complete purchasing journey makes sense when heard through speech.

Technical testing asks whether the implementation meets defined requirements. User-centred testing asks whether someone can actually use it. Mature accessibility programmes need both.

Inclusion starts with employment

There is another business lesson here. If you want your organisation to understand the barriers people with disabilities face, employ people who live with those barriers.

That does not mean recruiting someone with a disability solely to review accessibility or speak on behalf of every person with a disability. It means creating a workplace in which people with disabilities can build careers across the business, from technology and customer service to finance, operations, communications and leadership.

When people with different lived experiences are part of the workforce, they bring perspectives that would otherwise be missing. They notice assumptions, question processes and identify obstacles because they encounter similar barriers in their own lives. Those insights emerge in routine conversations and everyday work, not only during a scheduled accessibility review.

The benefit extends well beyond digital design. An employee might identify that a recruitment process is difficult to navigate with assistive technology, that internal documents exclude colleagues, or that a customer service policy assumes everyone can use a particular channel. They might recognise that a proposed product, process or communication will create unnecessary dependence for some customers.

These observations help an organisation identify challenges earlier, before they become complaints, failed customer journeys, expensive remediation projects or legal cases. They also improve the organisation as a place to work.

But employment alone is not enough. People need accessible recruitment, effective workplace adjustments, genuine opportunities to progress and the confidence that raising a concern will be taken seriously. Representation has little value if employees are expected to adapt quietly to inaccessible systems or if their experience is ignored.

Employing people with disabilities does not replace formal standards, specialist expertise or user research. It gives the organisation a deeper and more continuous understanding of why those things matter.

The danger of the percentage

Senior leaders like percentages because they make complicated problems appear manageable. A dashboard showing 71% conformance creates a sense of measurable progress. The number can be tracked, reported and discussed at a governance meeting.

It can also create false confidence.

The more useful questions are whether customers with disabilities can independently find and compare products, understand prices and offers, manage their basket, choose a delivery slot, pay and recover when something goes wrong. These are not alternatives to detailed accessibility criteria. They are the real-world journeys those criteria are meant to protect.

Organisations should still measure defects and conformance. They should also measure task completion, severity, customer impact and whether people need assistance to finish essential journeys. A percentage without that context tells only part of the story.

What organisations should do now

The business response should not be a rushed audit followed by a remediation project that ends when the spreadsheet turns green. Start with the services that matter most to customers and identify the journeys that allow someone to buy, bank, travel, communicate, manage an account or access support.

Test those journeys from beginning to end. Use automated tools to catch repeatable technical failures, then add expert manual testing for keyboard interaction, screen reader behaviour, focus order, error handling and content clarity.

Build disability inclusion into the organisation itself. Recruit people with disabilities into meaningful roles, make the workplace accessible and ensure they can influence the business through their work and expertise. Listen when employees identify barriers, whether those barriers affect customers, colleagues or both.

Most importantly, treat accessibility as an ongoing business responsibility. Requirements should include accessibility from the start. Designers should consider interaction and content before development begins. Developers need accessible components and clear acceptance criteria. Product owners should understand which barriers prevent customers from completing important tasks.

Leadership should ask about customer outcomes, employee experience and whose perspectives might be missing. That shift changes accessibility from a periodic compliance exercise into part of how the organisation operates.

The wider lesson

The French ruling is significant because legal pressure is increasing. Organisations providing services in European markets should pay close attention to it, particularly now that a failure to comply can carry a continuing financial penalty.

But the bigger lesson is human. For a blind customer, an inaccessible grocery website can mean losing independence and having to ask somebody else for help with an ordinary household task. For someone with limited dexterity, poor keyboard support can make a purchase impossible. For someone with a cognitive disability, unclear instructions or unpredictable errors can stop the journey entirely.

Those outcomes cannot be softened by saying that most of the website passed.

Accessibility is about whether people can perceive, understand and use the service you have built. Standards help us get there. Audits help us find the gaps. Compliance gives organisations a legal reason to act. Employing people with disabilities brings valuable perspectives into the business and helps reveal barriers before they become expensive failures.

Takeaway

Do not ask only how many accessibility criteria your service meets. Ask whether people with disabilities are represented across your workforce, whether their experience is valued and whether customers can complete the journeys that brought them to you.

If they cannot, the work is not finished.

Sources: France’s major court decision supporting digital accessibility under the EAA, Deque, 11 June 2026, the announcement from Droit Pluriel and France 3’s report on the €500 daily penalty.