DEV Community: Peculiar Systems

The paragraph and the checkout

Peculiar Systems — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:15:14 +0000

Researched with the help of an AI assistant, which searched registers and legal texts in many languages. Every fact below was checked against the linked primary source before publishing.

In March the Dutch consumer regulator reported on a test of about a hundred of the country's biggest online stores, telecom and energy sites. It had tried to shop at each one with assistive technology, the kind blind and partially sighted people rely on. At 61% of them it could not place an order.

Sometimes the order button could not be reached with a keyboard. Sometimes a puzzle meant to prove you are human could not be solved without seeing it. At another 33%, ordering was possible but took far more effort.

The regulator's own summary puts it plainly: an inaccessible webshop costs customers, with and without a disability.

The paragraph

Europe's accessibility law has covered online shops since 28 June 2025. We went through what the authorities of all twenty-seven EU countries have published since. We found four fines, all in Czechia, where the inspectorate publishes every fine as a public spreadsheet.

They add up to fourteen thousand crowns, about €580. The smallest, CZK 1,000 or about €41, became final on 11 June against a jewellery retailer.

The fine as the Czech register lists it. One sum covers both laws, so there is no telling how much of the €41 was for accessibility.

None of the four is for a checkout a customer could not use. All four are for breaking one rule in the Czech law: a shop must explain, in its terms and conditions, how its service is accessible. The inspection records show who was fined: a jewellery chain, a sportswear shop, a home-textiles shop and the company that runs Brno's motor-racing circuit.

The law allows up to CZK 1,000,000 for this. For a website that is actually inaccessible, it allows ten times more.

The four fines next to the most the law allows. Each step on the scale is ten times the one before.

The checkout

The paragraph is what gets fined. The checkout is what the inspectors keep finding.

France's consumer watchdog has checked more than 20 shopping sites this year and found problems at more than half of them. Several platforms have promised to fix their sites by the end of 2026. In the spring the Czech inspectorate checked 47 online shops for accessibility and found breaches at 10.

Sweden's regulator is testing the part of each site where people actually shop. It opened cases against 17 large online shops in 2025 and 11 more in March.

Customers are also writing in. By August Germany's regulator held 115 tips and requests about online shops. Finland's regulator got 24 complaints about digital services in 2025.

Advice before fines

Fines are slow partly because the machinery is new, and partly by design.

How far each country has got, going by what its authorities have published.

Some countries are still building. In January the European Commission warned nine countries that their versions of the law were incomplete, including the rules on enforcement. In March it warned Germany and Croatia again. Spain set up a unit to coordinate its regional inspectors only in February 2026. Germany's regulator started work in September 2025 and by June had almost 700 complaints and notices to work through.

Others advise first on purpose. Austria reported 84 cases in the first year, mostly against banks, and no fines. Finland's regulator answered most complaints with advice, and its law has no fines at all. In Hungary a fine can only follow a warning the company ignores. Italy's regulator moves to penalties only after "prolonged inaction". In Denmark the regulator cannot fine anyone; that is a job for the police.

"Not only a little accessible"

The customers did not wait. Two French disability groups took four grocery chains to court. Against Carrefour they brought statements from three users and video recordings of the site.

Carrefour's own accessibility statement rated its site at 71.21%. The judge in Caen said that was not enough. From the ruling, in our translation:

A shopping site "cannot be only a little accessible; it must be fully so."

The ruling gives Carrefour six months to fix its website and app. After that it owes €500 for every day they are not. It also awarded the two groups €10,000 in interim damages. That one payment is about seventeen times all four Czech fines put together.

It could have gone the other way. A month earlier a court in Lille threw out the same case against Auchan's online shop. It applied an older French law that only covers companies with more than €250 million in turnover. The groups have appealed.

A door that is not open everywhere

France is the only country where we found a case, and not every country leaves the door open. Spain's law lets customers and disability organisations go to court. In Ireland a customer can ask the Circuit Court for an order to comply. We found no case in either yet.

In Germany, associations can ask the regulator to act, but not sue a shop under the accessibility law. The federal conciliation board could only log accessibility complaints in 2025, not handle them, for lack of staff. In Italy and Poland the accessibility law offers customers a complaint, not a lawsuit.

Quiet is not the same as none

Most countries publish no list of individual fines, so for them "no fines" means none that we could see. Latvia, Hungary and Slovakia do publish their decisions. We read them all, and none is under the accessibility law yet.

Loud is not the same as real, either. One first-year review reports a German fine in the "upper-five-figure range", issued by a federal export-control office. That office is not mentioned anywhere in the German law. The same review gives a reference number for Spain's accessibility law that belongs to a ruling about water rights in the town of Ibi. And the €90,000 fine against the airline Vueling was issued in 2020, under an older Spanish law.

What to fix first

Fifteen months in, the pattern holds everywhere we looked. Regulators fine the paperwork, slowly. Inspectors, courts and customers go straight to the checkout.

So fix both, in that order. The accessibility paragraph in your terms takes a day, and it is the only thing anyone has been fined for. Then walk the way from your home page to a finished order with a keyboard and a screen reader. That is where the Dutch regulator got stuck, and where your customers already do.

Regulators read the terms first. Customers start at the checkout.

Checked 25 September 2026. The Czech list of fines runs to 29 June 2026, and more Czech fines are likely. The French cases against E.Leclerc and Picard had no published decision. We could not search the German and French regulators' records directly.

As of when — three product bets killed by year-old AI research

Peculiar Systems — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 22:48:53 +0000

Drafted with the help of an AI assistant — which is also what this piece is about. Every fact below was checked against the linked primary sources.

On 11 September the EU's new duty to report exploited vulnerabilities came into force. That same morning, the agency that enforces it switched on a platform that does the filing for you, free, with a login you already have.

We had a product priced to do that filing.

That was one of three bets we killed this month. We had researched all three with an AI assistant and written them down properly — named buyer, competitor prices, a date the buyer could not argue with. Then we checked each one against its sources before building, which is the boring step everybody skips, and none of the three survived it. Almost everything that killed them had already happened before we wrote them down.

That order is deliberate. An idea gets an hour with an assistant, because ideas are cheap and there are always more of them than there are days. Only the few that survive into a written bet get the expensive day against primary sources. Wide and cheap first, narrow and slow second.

The board that month held 171 options, 12 of them marked ready to start — marks made by the same research this note is about. Three bets got the expensive day, one of those twelve and two from the tier below. None survived it in the shape we had written down; the ideas went back on the board, the bets did not.

The regulator shipped the tool

The Cyber Resilience Act is a good deadline. Fines reach €15M. Two thirds of the manufacturers and developers OpenSSF polled had barely heard of it three months before it bit. Our note said there was nothing under €99 a month that bundled reporting readiness with a disclosure page.

When we checked, CVD Portal's disclosure tier was free forever, CRAToolkit was selling the paperwork at €29, and ConformOps was reading your repository for €99 once. We had priced against a gap that three products were already standing in.

The fear was smaller than the headline, too. A carve-out means small vendors cannot be fined for missing the 24-hour alarm — the deadline everyone quotes. They still have to file, and the reports that follow still carry a fine. But the part that sounded most frightening is the part they cannot be punished for.

What is left is the real date, fifteen months out, when the full technical file arrives — and which nobody is selling against yet, because it is not in the news.

The rules we were selling against were deleted

We had priced a tool that writes safety sheets and chemical labels for small makers — candles, diffusers, cleaning products — ahead of the EU labelling overhaul. Two obligations were coming. One was a set of new hazard classes. The other was new label formatting rules, down to minimum font size and line spacing, plus a hard six-month clock to reissue a label whenever a classification changed.

That clock was the product. A recurring obligation is what a subscription is for.

The formatting rules were not delayed. They were deleted — font size, spacing, typeface, colour, all struck out in favour of "labels must be readable," which is what the law said before. The six-month clock became "without undue delay." Whatever was left moved to 2030.

You cannot sell a subscription against without undue delay.

The hazard classes survived — but not on the date we had written down. The 1 November 2026 deadline everyone quotes is for substances. Candles, diffusers and cleaning products are mixtures: new ones have had to comply since May, and anything already on a shelf has until May 2028. Either way it is one afternoon of work per product, once. And the incumbent we were undercutting turned out not to charge $199 a sheet, as its headline says, but $199 a year for a small maker's first four.

What the AI told us	What was true
Fines up to €15M	No fine for the 24-hour alarm, if you are small
Minimum font size and line spacing	"Labels must be readable"
1 November 2026	May 2028 for mixtures already on shelves

Three lines from the research the assistant gave us, and what the sources actually said.

Nothing to do with the product

We had priced an e-paper dashboard for one narrow audience — aviation weather, ham radio, servers in a basement — sold as a device plus a licence. The category earns: the leader sold out its first batch in weeks, and single-person campaigns on Crowd Supply cleared $464,390 and $591,237 this year.

Then, in three months, three moves. In May, an open display protocol joined the Home Assistant foundation and shipped inside Home Assistant — so any panel now speaks to the installed base without us. In July, a finished device with a case and a battery landed at $39.90, against the $150 we had penciled in. And the leader quietly published a wholesale price list with purchase orders and Net 30, which was the last thing on our list of what it did not do.

None of that is the reason we stopped.

We stopped because putting your own name on a WiFi device sold into Europe makes you its manufacturer, with the security file, the registrations in every country you ship to, and — since the EU scrapped its €150 duty relief in July — a €3 charge on every product category in a box shipped in from outside the EU, counted per tariff line rather than per parcel. Meanwhile the panels themselves are on six-to-twelve-month lead times, because supermarket shelf labels are eating the supply and a two-person buyer is last in that queue.

Nobody beat us to the product. The product stopped being the hard part.

The half that still works is the software: the leader makes more from $50 licences for screens people already own than it ever made from the subscription it cancelled.

What the three have in common

Competitors played a part in only one of the three. In the cybersecurity bet rivals did fill the sub-€99 gap, inside a month — though the regulator went first, and what it handed out for free was the part we meant to charge for. In the other two the rivals were there all along and are not what stopped us: one obligation was deleted by the people who wrote it, and one product ran into conformity paperwork and a supply queue long before anybody could outsell us.

What they share is timing. The rules that make you the manufacturer of a WiFi device have been mandatory since August 2025; the panel shortage was reported in March; the labelling rules were struck in June; the EU's €150 parcel relief ended in July. All of it was public before we wrote the bets down. None of it was in the answers we got.

The cheap hour was never built to catch this. It answers one question: is there a buyer, and what do they pay today — and it reads the headline price, not the footnote. What moved in July is not its job. Catching movement is what the expensive day is for — and this month it earned its keep three times. The failure would have been skipping it, not running it.

The assistant we researched with searched the web every time. It found what ranks: explainers, vendor blogs, launch posts, written when each story was news and not touched since. It stitched them into one answer, in the present tense, with no date on any of it. It searched for the story it already knew, and found it. A lag on top of a lag, delivered as if it were this morning.

That part is on us. We asked what was true and never asked as of when.

So the hour changed shape. It still opens with as of when. But we no longer trust the answer — searching was never the problem; ranking was. Now the hour ends with a second, separate search: what has changed on this in the last twelve months. Not the topic. The changes. And a source that comes back without a date is struck on the spot, in the cheap hour, not discovered on the expensive day.

When	What happened
Aug 2025	Security rules make you the manufacturer of a WiFi device
Mar 2026	Panel shortage reported: shelf labels eat the supply
Jun 2026	Label formatting rules struck out, rest moved to 2030
Jul 2026	EU scraps its €150 parcel duty relief
Early Sep	We write the three bets down
11 Sep	The regulator switches on its free platform

Everything above the bold row was already public when we asked. Only the row below it was news.

So the check that matters is not "is this real." It is "what has moved since this was written." When an AI hands you the answer, find the date on every source behind it — the newest document wins, not the most-linked one.

That day costs. This month it cancelled three products we had scoped at ten days to three weeks each — six weeks of building, bought for three days. That is the whole case for the expensive day, and three is not a sample, so ask us in a year. A fourth product shipped on 7 September.

Even this note. The AI we asked to review it fetched the published page live, twice, and both times read the first draft — the one that still said no competitor had beaten us.

The board still holds eleven marks made by the same research. We trust them less than we did on the first of September.

Checked 23 September 2026. The chemicals package is a provisional agreement — the 2030 date is not final and can move again.

Originally published at peculiar.systems/notes.