The State of EU E-Commerce Accessibility 2026 - AccessLumens

All research52.3%<br>Still ship a critical barrier<br>of 107 scored sites

42.1%<br>Fail WCAG 4.1.2<br>most-litigated criterion

27.6%<br>Blocked the scan<br>bot walls and CAPTCHAs

91.9<br>Average score<br>out of 100

The nuance that matters: the average score across the 107 scored sites was 91.9 out of 100, which sounds encouraging until you look underneath. 52.3% still carried at least one critical barrier : a control a screen reader cannot operate, a menu a keyboard cannot reach, a checkout that locks out anyone not using a mouse. A good score and a locked-out customer are not mutually exclusive.<br>Of the 170 sites attempted, 107 returned scannable results. 47 blocked the scan entirely with bot protection or CAPTCHAs. Another 16 served JavaScript shells with no usable content for a headless browser. That reachability picture is a finding in its own right.

The Carrefour problem

In November 2025, French disability-rights organizations filed the first lawsuits under the EAA against four grocery retailers: Carrefour, Auchan, E.Leclerc, and Picard. In June 2026, a French court ordered Carrefour to make its e-commerce site fully accessible under penalty of daily fines. We scanned all four.<br>Carrefour was bot-blocked. Bot-blocked on both carrefour.fr and carrefour.es. The retailer a French court ordered to remediate has deployed protections that block the very tools used to verify accessibility. We could not scan it at all.<br>CarrefourBot-blocked<br>Bot-blocked on both carrefour.fr and carrefour.es. The retailer a French court ordered to remediate has deployed protections that block the very tools used to verify accessibility.

PicardUnscannable<br>Returned a JavaScript shell with no usable content for a headless browser.

Auchan94/100<br>Respectable, but still carrying non-critical barriers.

E.Leclerc87/100<br>Multiple issues, though none classified as critical.

Draw your own conclusions. A year after the lawsuits and weeks after a court order, two of the four are completely unreachable by accessibility tooling, and neither of the remaining two is fully clean.

“The retailer a court ordered to fix its accessibility has deployed protections that block the very tools used to verify accessibility.”<br>Key findings<br>1. More than half of Europe’s biggest stores still ship a critical barrier.<br>52.3% of scored sites carried at least one critical issue, and 42.1% failed WCAG 4.1.2 (Name, Role, Value), the criterion most frequently cited in accessibility lawsuits on both sides of the Atlantic. One year of enforcement has not yet moved the enterprise tier.

2. A quarter of sites could not be audited at all.<br>27.6% of sites blocked the scan with bot protection: IKEA across four countries, MediaMarkt across five, Zara, Mango, El Corte Inglés, Fnac, Albert Heijn, Tesco Ireland. A wall that stops a scanner also degrades screen readers, voice control, and automated monitoring. When you fortify your checkout, you can end up keeping out the people the EAA was written to protect.

3. Accessibility overlays correlated with worse scores, not better.<br>The 7 sites running an overlay widget averaged 88.5, versus 92.1 for sites without one, a 3.6-point gap in the wrong direction. It is the first time this pattern has been documented at scale across EU e-commerce, under the EAA framework.

4. The sectors the law prioritizes are performing worst.<br>66.7% of telecom sites and 55% of banking sites carry a critical barrier. Electronic communications, banking, and transport are the sectors the EAA calls out by name, yet they sit at the bottom of the table.

5. A perfect score is achievable, and 3 retailers proved it.<br>Darty, Bol.com, Żabka each scored a clean 100 across every page we tested. Three countries, three sectors, three scales. Proof that conformance is a normal outcome, not a moonshot.

Three sites got it right

A perfect 100 with zero issues detected, across three different countries, sectors, and scales.<br>100<br>Darty<br>France

100<br>Bol.com<br>Netherlands

100<br>Żabka<br>Poland

Country by country<br>Scores cluster tightly between 90 and 95. The real differences show up in critical-barrier rates and in how many sites blocked the scan entirely. Sweden leads; the Netherlands has the highest critical-barrier rate; France and Spain had the worst reachability.<br>Critical-barrier rate by country<br>Share of scored sites in each country with at least one critical barrier. Lower is better.

Sweden

33%<br>Poland

27%<br>Netherlands

67%<br>Germany

58%<br>France

58%<br>Ireland

58%<br>Spain

55%<br>Italy

58%

Accessibility by country: sites scored, sites blocked, average score, critical-barrier prevalence, and top WCAG failureCountryScoredBlockedAvg score% with criticalTop WCAG failureSweden15494.933%2.4.1 Bypass BlocksPoland11293.427%1.4.3 ContrastNetherlands15791.767%2.4.1 Bypass BlocksGermany19991.458%2.4.1 Bypass BlocksFrance12991.258%2.4.1 Bypass BlocksIreland12391.258%4.1.2 Name, Role, ValueSpain1199155%4.1.2 Name, Role, ValueItaly12490.358%4.1.2 Name,...