On 4 June 2026 a court in Caen gave Carrefour six months to make its shopping site and app fully accessible, at EUR 500 for every day it runs over. The defense had been that the site already met 71% of the criteria. The judge refused partial credit: “Le site de e-commerce concerné ne peut pas être seulement un peu accessible, il doit l’être totalement”, which is to say that an e-commerce site cannot be only a little accessible, it has to be accessible completely. apiDV and Droit Pluriel, two disability associations, brought the case, and Faire Face and France 3 Normandie reported it.
Carrefour is not a small business and its site is not a stock theme. The losing argument is what carries over: the work was measured, documented and mostly done, and the court held that mostly done is not done. I build themes, so I read that as a template problem before I read it as a legal one.
- Law
- EAA, applying since June 2025
- Filings
- Seyfarth Shaw: 3,117 in US federal court, 2025
- Measure
- one million home pages, February 2026
Where the visitor sits decides which law applies
The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025. It reaches, in the words of Article 3(4) of Directive (EU) 2019/882, “any natural or legal person who provides a service on the Union market or makes offers to provide such a service to consumers in the Union”. The test is where the customer is, and registration does not enter into it.
Article 2(2) closes the list of covered services: electronic communications, audiovisual media, named parts of passenger transport, consumer banking, e-books, and e-commerce, which Article 3(30) defines as selling at a distance through a website at a consumer’s own request.
If your site takes orders from people in the EU, you are on the list; a brochure site with a contact form is not.
I have written this paragraph before with different nouns. When the subject was web fonts and the law was the GDPR, the mechanism was the same: the law follows the visitor, not the server. Rouse and aera set the two side by side in August 2025, and Article 30(2) reuses the GDPR formula of penalties that are effective, proportionate and dissuasive.
Each country wrote its own penalties, and they do not sit on one scale. The Swedish transposition, Lag (2023:254), allows an administrative charge from SEK 10,000 to SEK 10 million, roughly EUR 900 to EUR 900,000 at September 2026 rates, and the top of that is a ceiling nobody is known to have paid under the EAA. Ireland went criminal instead, up to EUR 60,000 or eighteen months on indictment, for offenses like ignoring a regulator direction.
Microenterprises are exempt, and the boolean matters
Article 4(5), read with Article 3(23), exempts microenterprises providing services: fewer than ten staff and either turnover or balance sheet no higher than EUR 2 million. If you are five people selling courses, the service rules do not reach you. The exemption covers services only, so a microenterprise putting a covered product on the market stays in scope. And the threshold moves the day you hire an eleventh person, which is a poor moment to start reading how your template was built. Thresholds are also what the first cases turned on.
In early May 2026 the court in Lille dismissed the parallel claim against Auchan E-Commerce, accepting that the site was not accessible and then applying an older EUR 250 million turnover threshold instead of the EUR 2 million one. Both rulings are first-instance summary orders, and apiDV has appealed.
Article 32(1) runs a transitional period to 28 June 2030, but it covers only service contracts signed before 28 June 2025 and products already in lawful use, which leaves a theme you buy this month with no grace at all.
Thousands of US filings a year
The US has no equivalent statute; what it has is a filing industry. Seyfarth Shaw counted 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits filed in US federal court in 2025, 27% more than in 2024, though 2025 sits below the 2022 peak of 3,255. That is a law firm keyword-searching a docket feed, federal courts only, and the firm notes that some cases were probably missed. UsableNet, which adds the New York and California state courts, reviewed more than 5,000 website, app and video suits over a window its own report runs from 1 January to 15 December 2025, and it reads federal filings as slightly down year over year, the opposite direction from Seyfarth. Neither is a court statistic. What survives the disagreement is the order of magnitude: thousands a year, mostly against online stores.
Who ends up on the docket matters more than the count, and the 2025 year-end report from UsableNet has 70% of the filings reviewed targeting e-commerce and 64% of the companies sued reporting under $25 million in revenue. The same report has defendants above $25 million at 27% of cases in 2023, 33% in 2024 and 36% in 2025, so the share of large defendants has grown three years running.
Of those 3,117 federal cases, New York had 1,021, Florida 961 and Illinois 585, while the federal courts in California saw four, because California courts hold that online-only businesses fall outside the ADA.
Run a small shop outside New York and Florida and your odds this year are low, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to sell you a theme. Missouri went the other way on 28 August 2026, writing a 90-day cure window into law and routing enforcement to its Attorney General, so the US direction is contested rather than one-way.
A million home pages under a scanner
Every February, WebAIM runs the WAVE engine over the home pages of the million most-visited sites. In February 2026, 95.9% of them had at least one automatically detectable WCAG failure, up from 94.8% a year earlier, reversing small improvements in each of the previous six years. Those pages averaged 56.1 detected errors each, 10.1% more than the 51 per page of 2025.
The scope is narrow: home pages only, one page per site, the top million sites, failures a machine can see, WAVE, February 2026. WebAIM says the rest out loud: an absence of detected errors does not indicate a page is accessible or conformant.
I sat down to write that WordPress is the worst platform on this measure. The 2026 WebAIM Million put me right: WordPress home pages average 52.8 detected errors, fewer than the 56.1 all-site average and far more than Wix or Squarespace manage.
| Platform | Average detected errors per home page | Against the 56.1 average |
|---|---|---|
| Squarespace | 33.0 | 41.2% below |
| Wix | 33.3 | 40.6% below |
| WordPress | 52.8 | 5.8% below |
| Shopify | 75.1 | 33.9% above |
That 52.8 is a shade worse than the 50.0 WordPress home pages averaged a year ago, and WebAIM warns that errors correlated with a technology cannot always be attributed to it.
The errors that arrive with the template
Six error types account for 96% of every error WebAIM detected, and they have been the same six for seven years. Low-contrast text turned up on 83.9% of home pages, missing alt text on 53.1%, missing form labels on 51%, empty links on 46.3%, empty buttons on 30.6% and a missing document language on 13.5%. Those are shares of pages; the 96% is a share of errors.
Errors the writer owns
Be fair about the split, because the theme author is a convenient villain. No theme forgot to write your alt text, and the contrast failure on your pricing table may be a color you chose yourself. The inheritance argument holds for empty links and buttons, unlabeled inputs, focus states and skip links, and stops short of the whole 96%.
Errors the template owns
The skip link carries the least ambiguity of anything WebAIM counts: 17.1% of home pages had one at all, up from 15.3% in 2025, and one in ten of those was broken, hidden where a keyboard could not reach it or aimed at a target that was not on the page. Nothing you type creates or breaks a skip link.
Contrast is not one mistake per page: the average home page held 34 distinct instances of low-contrast text, 15% more than a year earlier, and a palette that fails once fails everywhere it is used. In the same scan, 33.1% of form inputs had no label.
Nothing you type creates or breaks a skip link.
What the theme owes you in the first line of the body
One anchor and a style rule: first in the document, visible when it takes focus, pointed at an element that exists on every template.
<a class="skip-link screen-reader-text" href="#main">Skip to content</a>
...
<main id="main" tabindex="-1">If the anchor is there and the target id is not, the link belongs to the broken tenth.
These are the failures no amount of careful writing will fix:
- A skip link that exists, takes focus from the keyboard and points at a region present on every template.
- A focus state you can see on every interactive element, including the ones drawn as bare icons.
- Color pairs in the palette that clear contrast before anyone gets to choose between them.
- Form fields with real labels, rather than placeholder text standing in for one.
- A document language set by the template, not by the person writing the posts.
WebAIM also scans what pages are built from, and its 2026 technology tables report that “the presence of nearly all of these popular JavaScript libraries was associated with an increase in detected accessibility errors”: jQuery at 64.9 errors per page across 560,294 pages, Bootstrap 63.3, Slider Revolution 67.2, Swiper 74.0, jQuery UI 79.9, against that 56.1 average. The list reads like the dependency block of a theme I could name, though the same non-attribution caveat applies here as to the CMS table.
Pages are getting heavier: the average home page reached 1,437 elements in February 2026, a 22.5% increase in one year. The WebAIM reading: “These trends likely reflect broader shifts in web development including increased reliance on 3rd party frameworks and libraries and automated or AI-assisted coding practices (‘vibe coding’). Home pages are getting larger and more technologically complex at an alarming rate, making accessibility more difficult to achieve and maintain.”
An overlay is a script tag with a settlement attached
Vendors answer all of this with a widget you paste into the page. Of the 3,948 suits EcomBack tracked in 2025, 983, or 24.9%, were against sites that already had an accessibility widget installed, and three-quarters of the sued sites had none.
In January 2025 the FTC charged accessiBe over what the company claimed for accessWidget, and approved the final order that April. accessiBe paid $1 million and may no longer claim without evidence that its products “can make any website WCAG-compliant or can ensure continued compliance with WCAG over time”. The FTC brought it as a deceptive advertising case and settled it; no court has held overlays unlawful, and the order puts in writing what an overlay cannot promise.
Ten tools went at a deliberately broken page in a 2017 test by the UK Government Digital Service, and the best performer found 41% of the planted barriers. Deque, scoring its own tooling across roughly 2,000 audits in 2021, claims 57%, counted by issue volume and not by success criterion. Either way, a clean scan only tells you the low bar has been cleared. Run one over a theme demo anyway, because all six of the commonest errors are the kind a machine can see.
| Overlay | Scan | Template | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contrast in the palette | Repainted at runtime | Every instance flagged | Fixed once, in the palette |
| Skip link | Injected, sometimes | Reported present or missing | Shipped and reachable |
| Labels on form fields | Guessed from nearby text | Flagged, never fixed | Written into the markup |
| What it proves in a claim | The vendor cannot promise it | Nothing on its own | The work was done |
What to check before you buy
WordPress has one gate for this and most buyers never see it. Themes in the free directory can carry an accessibility-ready tag after an optional manual review, and about 106 carried it in September 2026. The requirements were rewritten in May 2026 to add reflow and text spacing, an accessibility statement, and a ban on recommending inaccessible plugins. Tagged themes have to be re-reviewed by 30 September 2026 or lose the listing.
Only the free directory reviews any of this. No commercial marketplace has an equivalent gate, a gap I have complained about for years. What the directory hands every buyer is the required list, which doubles as a shopping list:
- Keyboard navigation support, and controls that expose an accessible name, role and state.
- A skip-to-content link, labeled form fields, and headings in a meaningful structure.
- Sufficient color contrast on text and on user interface controls.
- Alternative text on images, plus accessible audio, video and animation.
- Screen reader text where it is needed, and landmark roles with meaningful names.
All of it can be tested on a demo without installing anything. Tab through the header and watch where the focus ring goes. Click into the search field and see whether it has a label or a placeholder standing in for one. The security version of this list already exists on this site, and this is the row it is missing.
Three things to ask the author before the license is paid for:
- An accessibility statement. The free directory now requires one, and a commercial author can write it in an afternoon.
- The WCAG level the theme is built to, given as a version and a level rather than as a mood.
- Accessibility fixes named in the changelog, so you can see whether any have ever shipped.
WCAG 2.1 Level AA is what everything is measured against today, though the target is moving: in September 2026 ETSI published EN 301 549 V4.1.1, with clauses 9, 10 and 11 aligned to WCAG 2.2. There is one claim no author can honestly make, and it is EAA-compliant. The Act never names WCAG, and no European standard has been cited in the Official Journal for it, so the Article 15 presumption of conformity is open to nobody yet.
Cheaper than the letter
None of this predicts that you will be sued, and the case for caring at purchase time is arithmetic rather than odds: contrast pairs, focus states and a skip link cost an afternoon while the theme is being chosen, and a rebuild once the whole site sits on top of them.
UsableNet counted 1,427 suits in that same 1 January to 15 December window against companies that had already been sued, 45% of all federal cases, and 36% of the top 500 e-commerce retailers drew at least one suit.
Carrefour has until early December to finish, at EUR 500 for every day past that, on a site the lawyers defending it had measured at 71% of the way there.
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