Romania's Digital Accessibility Law, One Year On — Wawsome Finds Most Company Sites Still Fail Basic Tests

Romania transposed the EU's European Accessibility Act (EAA) through Law 232/2022, and digital-accessibility obligations for covered sectors — e-commerce, consumer banking, electronic communications, e-books and certain passenger transport services — became enforceable on 28 June 2025.

One year later, Wawsome, a European AI-based digital accessibility platform, published findings from its own evaluation data and interactions with organisations over that year (28 June 2025 – 28 June 2026): roughly nine in ten of the websites it assessed presented significant accessibility barriers. The most common failures were insufficient colour contrast, missing alternative text for images, inaccessible forms, difficult keyboard navigation and incorrect use of screen-reader markup (ARIA).

Wawsome itself states that its conclusions are based on aggregated internal data from its own site evaluations and client interactions, and explicitly does not claim to be an exhaustive or statistically representative study of all Romanian companies. Even so, the figures were reported independently by multiple national outlets — the state news agency AGERPRES, business daily Capital, and others — indicating the finding was treated as credible and newsworthy.

The pattern echoes what monitoring has found elsewhere after similar mandates took effect (for example in Ecuador and Panama): passing a legal deadline does not, on its own, produce compliance. Romania's own digitalisation authority (ADR) is separately required to publish periodic public-sector monitoring reports under EU Directive 2016/2102, which points to independent, recurring monitoring — rather than the deadline itself — as the lever that moves practice.

Read the full analysis: https://agerpres.ro/ots/la-un-an-de-la-aplicarea-legislatiei-europene-privind-accesibilitatea-digitala-9-din-10-companii-ana--661162