Carrefour’s 71% wasn’t enough: what the ruling means for alt text

A French court has told Carrefour that a website that is mostly accessible is not accessible enough. In an order dated June 4, the court in Caen gave the retailer six months to make its site and mobile app fully accessible, with a €500 penalty for each day it runs late afterward, according to disability news site Faire Face. Carrefour had pointed to a 71% conformance rate. The judge said an online shop cannot be only a little accessible; it has to be accessible entirely.

Did the court name missing alt text? None of the reports we read quote the order on images, so we will not say it did. What we can say is that image descriptions are written into the standard Carrefour was measured against, which makes this a good moment to check your own. Our earlier look at the first year of EAA enforcement covers how this case fits with the others.

Where images sit in the standard

The yardstick is the RGAA, France’s accessibility reference, which has 106 criteria. The government’s published criteria list opens with images. Criterion 1.1 asks whether every informative image has a text alternative. Criterion 1.2 asks whether each decorative image is properly ignored by assistive technology.

In plain terms: describe the pictures that carry meaning, and silence the ones that do not. The W3C’s image decision tree gives the same rule, with empty alt text for purely decorative images. Our post on decorative versus informative images helps you sort which is which.

In a shop, the informative images are the ones doing work: a product shot that shows color or fit, a graphic that states a price or a date. The decorative ones are dividers, background textures, a flourish beside a heading. If the words in a graphic appear nowhere else on the page, the description has to carry them.

Why a percentage is not a defense

A score is an average. A customer does not meet the average; they meet the one banner, product photo, or price graphic they needed to read. That is the practical lesson in a court rejecting 71%.

The case is not finished. Carrefour told E-Commerce Magazine it is reviewing the decision and reserves the right to appeal, and that it has a plan to reach 100% by the end of 2026. The French rules reach French companies; for the wider picture of US and EU rules, see accessibility laws marketers should know. This is not legal advice.

What to do this week

Start with the images people act on: product photos, prices, promotions, anything near a checkout button. Write the description when the image is made, not months later, because a site gains new images every day it publishes. With SnipAlt, snip the image with Ctrl+Shift+A (⌘⇧A on a Mac) and paste the result into the field. For the backlog, an audit of past posts shows how big it is.