Accessibility Overlays Are Not Compliance: What the Carrefour Ruling Settles

On 4 June 2026 the judicial court of Caen ruled against Carrefour over the inaccessibility of its grocery website and app to blind and partially sighted customers. The retailer has six months to comply, under a penalty of €500 for each day it does not. Carrefour’s defence included the argument that its site was 71% compliant. The court’s answer, in the words of the associations who brought the case, was that an e-commerce site cannot be somewhat accessible — it has to be accessible.

Fourteen months earlier, on the other side of the Atlantic, the US Federal Trade Commission finalised a $1 million order against accessiBe, the largest seller of accessibility overlay widgets, for claiming its product could make any website compliant with the accessibility guidelines when it could not.

Put those two decisions together and you have the whole subject of this note. A court has confirmed that partial accessibility is non-compliance, and a regulator has confirmed that the widget sold as the fix does not deliver it. If your plan for accessibility is a line of JavaScript, you do not have a plan.

What an overlay is, and what it honestly does

An overlay is third-party JavaScript added to your site that tries to improve accessibility from the outside, at the moment the page loads. Two different things get sold under the name, and they deserve different verdicts.

What it is	What it genuinely does	What it does not do
A widget with a toolbar — text size, contrast, spacing, read-aloud	Offers preferences some visitors find useful	Duplicates what browsers and operating systems already do better
Automated repair — a script that scans and patches the page	Can correct a narrow set of mechanical defects	Cannot fix the structural and content problems that cause most failures

Being fair to the category: the preference toolbar is not fraud, and a handful of visitors do use it. The problem is not that overlays do nothing. It is the claim attached to them — that installing one makes a site compliant — which is the specific claim the FTC took a million dollars over. The Overlay Fact Sheet, maintained and signed by a large group of accessibility practitioners, states the position plainly: no overlay product on the market can make a website fully compliant with any existing accessibility standard, and therefore none can eliminate legal risk.

Why a script cannot fix it

The reason is structural rather than a question of vendor quality. Accessibility standards are mostly about the meaning encoded in your markup and the content itself — and meaning is not something a script can infer after the fact.

Alternative text for images. A script can see that an alt attribute is missing. It cannot know that this photograph is the product in the customer’s chosen colour, or that the adjacent one is decorative and should be silent. Guessing wrong is worse than the gap.
Keyboard operability. If a menu, modal or date picker cannot be reached or escaped with a keyboard, the fix is in how the component was built. An overlay adds another layer of JavaScript on top of the trap.
Form labels and errors. Which label belongs to which field, and which message explains which failure, is knowledge that lives in your form’s design. A generic patch produces generic nonsense.
Headings and reading order. A screen reader user navigates by structure. If your headings are chosen for visual size rather than hierarchy, the document has no outline to navigate, and no runtime script can invent one.
Everything that is not HTML. Your PDF price list, your embedded video without captions, your third-party booking iframe. An overlay on the page does not reach any of them.

There is a second-order problem that makes some overlays actively harmful: they intervene in the same layer assistive technology reads. A script that rewrites roles and labels at load time can override correct markup with incorrect guesses, and screen reader users report exactly this — sites that were merely difficult becoming unusable once a widget was installed. That is why many blind users’ first request is that the overlay be removed. A tool that some visitors switch on and others need switched off is not a compliance measure.

What the law is actually asking for

The European Accessibility Act has applied to e-commerce and a range of digital services since 28 June 2025, transposed through each member state’s own law — in the Carrefour case, the French consumer code. The Caen ruling is the first enforcement decision to come out of that regime, and its logic is the part to internalise: the obligation is not a score you improve, it is an outcome you reach.

What an authority or claimant asks for	What an overlay gives you
Conformance against the standard, criterion by criterion	A vendor dashboard measuring the vendor’s own product
An accessibility statement describing real known gaps	A generic statement asserting compliance
Evidence of testing, including with assistive technology	Automated scan results
A remediation plan with dates and owners	A subscription
A route for users to report barriers and get an answer	Nothing

Note the second row especially. An accessibility statement that claims full conformance when the site does not conform is worse than no statement: it converts a technical shortfall into a documented misstatement, in front of exactly the audience most able to test it. The wider legal-page obligations sit alongside this, set out in our note on the legal pages an EU shop cannot skip.

And “the vendor told us we were compliant” is not a defence. After the FTC order, that sentence describes a marketing claim a regulator has already found unsupported — it establishes what you relied on, not that reliance was reasonable. Which makes this an ordinary supplier-diligence question of the kind in our note on the checklist to run before integrating a service.

Whether this applies to you at all

Worth establishing before anyone spends money. The Act reaches e-commerce and a list of digital services, and it follows the customer rather than the seller — a business outside the EU selling to EU consumers is in scope. But there is a real exemption, and it is the one most readers of this note will fall under.

Microenterprises providing services are exempt from the service obligations under Article 4(5) of the directive: fewer than ten people, and annual turnover or balance sheet total not above €2 million. The stated reasoning is that compliance would take a disproportionate share of a very small company’s resources. Note the shape of it — the exemption is for services; it does not extend to products.

Three things it does not mean. It is not an exemption from national law, which in some member states goes further than the directive’s floor. It is not a shield if you sell to the public sector, where procurement rules impose their own accessibility requirements on suppliers. And it evaporates the moment you hire your tenth employee — which is a poor moment to discover that the checkout needs rebuilding.

So the honest position for a genuinely small service business is: you are probably not obliged this year, the commercial argument is unaffected by the threshold, and the cheap fixes below are worth doing on their own merits.

What actually works, in order

The encouraging part: most failures on most business sites come from a short list of causes, and fixing them is ordinary front-end work rather than a specialist project.

Make everything operable by keyboard. Tab through your own site: every link, button, menu and form. If focus disappears, gets trapped, or the outline is invisible, you have found your first several fixes. This single pass finds more real barriers than any tool.
Label every form field properly, in markup. Not placeholder text. Then make error messages say which field and what is wrong.
Fix headings to describe structure, not to select a font size, so the page has a navigable outline.
Write alt text on the images that carry information, and mark the decorative ones as decorative. This is a content task for whoever knows the products.
Fix contrast and let text resize without the layout collapsing — the same ground covered in our note on typography and why people do not read.
Then test with real assistive technology and, if you can, real users. Automated tools find a minority of issues; a screen reader and a keyboard find the ones that stop a sale.
Publish an honest accessibility statement with the known gaps, the plan, and a contact route that a human answers.

Steps one to five are within reach of the developer who already maintains your site. That is the part the overlay pitch obscures: the work is not exotic, it is just work — and it also serves the visitors covered in our note on cognitive accessibility for neurodivergent users, who are not helped by a contrast toggle at all.

If you already have an overlay installed

Three steps, and the first is not “remove it today”.

Stop counting it as compliance. Whatever your contract says, your exposure is what your site does. Take the overlay out of your compliance story and put it where it belongs — an optional convenience.

Test the site with the overlay off, then on. With a keyboard and a screen reader, on your three most important journeys. If the widget makes things worse, that is now the most urgent finding you have, and it argues for removal rather than tuning.

Redirect the budget. An overlay subscription is usually an annual fee for a permanent problem. The same money spent on a keyboard-and-forms remediation pass buys a fix that stays fixed, and it is the only version of this spending that reduces the exposure the Caen ruling just made concrete. The broader business case is in our note on what accessibility law requires and what it is worth.

Key takeaways

On 4 June 2026 a French court ruled against Carrefour over an inaccessible grocery site and app — six months to comply, €500 per day thereafter — rejecting a 71% compliance figure on the principle that an e-commerce site must be accessible, not partly accessible.
The FTC’s $1 million order against accessiBe concerned exactly the claim that an overlay makes any website compliant with the guidelines.
No overlay can deliver conformance, because standards turn on meaning in markup and content that a runtime script cannot infer — alt text, keyboard operability, labels, heading structure, and everything in your PDFs and videos.
Some overlays make things worse by overriding correct markup in the layer assistive technology reads.
A compliance claim in your accessibility statement is a documented misstatement if the site does not conform. An honest statement of gaps is safer than an optimistic one.
The cheap majority of real fixes: keyboard operability, proper form labels, structural headings, alt text on informative images, contrast and resizable text.
Already have one? Stop counting it as compliance, test with it off and on, and move the subscription budget into remediation.