The European Accessibility Act has applied since June 28, 2025. A little over a year in, we now know what enforcement actually looks like, which is something no article written before the deadline could tell you. This piece is a status update for business owners: what has happened, what has not, how Romania has implemented the law, and what a sensible plan looks like for a site that is not yet where it should be. Earlier this year we made the business case for accessibility; this is the practical follow-up.
What the first year taught us
Enforcement has been steady rather than dramatic. Across the member states, authorities have focused on websites and online shops first, with mobile applications treated as a later phase. The typical sequence is a complaint or a market surveillance check, followed by a notice with a deadline for remediation. Financial penalties are the step after that, for organizations that do not respond, and as of mid-2026 they have been rare. The first court cases were filed in France in late 2025, and several countries have announced more active surveillance for the second half of this year.
Two lessons follow. The first is that the law is being enforced through process, which rewards organizations that can show a plan and demonstrate progress. The second is that the process starts with a complaint, and complaints come from real people who could not complete a real task. The most reliable way to stay out of the process is a site that works for them.
How Romania implemented it
Romania transposed the act through Law 232/2022, which sets accessibility requirements for products and services and has been enforced since June 2025 by the National Authority for Consumer Protection. The technical standard is EN 301 549, which for websites means the WCAG 2.1 AA criteria most teams already know. Penalties range from 6,000 to 15,000 lei, and the authority can also order corrective measures. Public sector sites have been under a separate, stricter regime since 2018, including a mandatory accessibility statement and a feedback mechanism.
For a private business selling to consumers in Romania, the practical summary is this: your website and any online shop are in scope, the standard is WCAG 2.1 AA, the enforcing body is one your customers already know how to contact, and micro-enterprises providing services have an exemption that most growing companies will not qualify for.
What "compliant" means for a website
The standard is long, but for most websites it reduces to a manageable set of properties. Every image that carries meaning has a text alternative. Pages have a logical heading structure. Everything can be operated from a keyboard, in a sensible order, with a visible focus. Color contrast meets the minimums. Forms have labels tied to their fields and errors that are announced. Video has captions. Content does not rely on color alone to convey meaning. The site works when zoomed to 200 percent. Nothing flashes.
Most of these are properties of how a site is built rather than of its content. That is why we treat them as properties of the components a site is assembled from: a form field, a menu, a dialog and a card each know how to behave, once, for every page that uses them. Content teams then have a much smaller set of things to get right, mainly alternative text and heading order, and the editorial interface can check those as they work.
A sensible plan for a site that is not there yet
If your site was built without accessibility as a design constraint, the path forward is orderly rather than frantic.
- Audit. An automated scan finds the mechanical issues quickly: missing alternative text, contrast, unlabeled fields. A manual review with a keyboard and a screen reader finds the interaction issues that scanners cannot. The result is a list ordered by how many people each item affects.
- Fix the templates first. Issues in shared components and page templates are fixed once and disappear everywhere. This is usually where most of the list lives, and it is the most cost-effective work.
- Then the content. Alternative text, heading structure and document accessibility are editorial work. We provide a prioritized list and the editorial tooling to work through it, starting with the most visited pages.
- Publish a statement. An accessibility statement that describes the standard you follow, what is known to be outstanding, and how to reach you is both good practice and, for some organizations, a requirement. It is also the single most effective way to turn a potential complaint into a conversation.
- Keep it that way. Automated checks in the release process catch regressions before they ship. New components are reviewed against the same criteria as the old ones. Accessibility becomes part of how the site is maintained, alongside performance and security, rather than a project that ends.
The quiet upside
Everything above is framed around the law because that is what prompts most of the conversations we have. But the sites that come out of this work are simply better: faster, clearer, easier to use on a phone in bright sunlight or on a slow connection, and easier for search engines and AI assistants to understand. The overlap between accessibility and quality is nearly complete. A year of enforcement has mostly confirmed what we already believed: this is work worth doing on its own merits, and the law is a good reason to schedule it.
If you would like to know where your site stands, we run audits that produce a short, prioritized report with an estimate next to each item. Knowing is the calm first step, and it usually turns out to be less work than expected.