A French court just made its first major EAA enforcement ruling

Hi again 👋

If you’re new here - hello, and welcome!

A quick orientation if you’re a new subscriber: this newsletter looks at accessibility on ecommerce sites through a commercial lens. Not compliance just for its own sake, but the barriers on product pages and checkout that are costing real businesses real sales.

I’m trying a new format, but the premise is the same: One idea for you a week, plain English, nothing to buy. Let me know what you think!

This week…

I built a11y.quest. As an aging software developer, I built it as a bit of fun to help drill me and to study for the Web Accessibility Specialist exam. 128 hand-written (and largely technical) questions across WCAG, ARIA, semantic HTML, keyboard and contrast, with plain-English answers and a difficulty setting so you can ease in or go straight for the hard ones.

It got shared around much more than I expected this week! If you fancy seeing where your knowledge actually stands, grab a coffee and head over to: a11y.quest then share your score (if you get a good one!)

An article from me

I’ve just given my colour contrast article a spring clean and a modernisation.

Here’s the headline: colour contrast is the number one accessibility failure for 7 years running - and is probably the easiest to fix. It also affects so many more people than you might initially think. Plus there’s a cool colour blindness simulator to help people with typical colour vision inch towards an understanding of how colour blindness affects your customers in everyday situations.

You can also geek out on the numbers behind the ratios: https://davedavies.dev/blog/wcag-colour-contrast-explained/

In the news: the EAA is coming for you

(well, hopefully not you)

Carrefour, a major supermarché in France, just found out the hard way.

A French court has ordered one of Europe’s biggest retailers to make its ecommerce site and app fully accessible, rather than just 71% accessible. It has six months to comply, and a fine of €500 for every day they run over.

Maybe not a household name in the UK to our younger readers (having sold their stores to the Dee Corporation, which turned them into Gateway, and effectively disappearing from the UK high street by the late 80’s), but Carrefour is a big deal in Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia. And it’s the first time a court has used the EAA to enforce a household-name to fix its online store or pay for the delay. It’s about time, and I’m sure that it will not be the last. Although is €500 a day a fine, or just an inconvenience to Carrefour?

BUT - the fine is not really the story. The story is that being accessible has become a condition of selling into the EU, and you must consider the people who are your customers, and listen to their needs.

So if you sell into Europe, that is the shape of things now. And if you have been reading these emails, you are hopefully the one watching it happen to everyone else and not to you!

Talk soon,
Dave