Roughly nine in ten Romanian company websites analyzed by Wawsome still failed basic accessibility checks a year after European Accessibility Act enforcement began, according to reporting on the scan by RomaniaTV. That single figure is the most concrete, sourced data point available on what “real” accessibility progress looks like across European businesses right now, and it’s a useful starting point precisely because it’s not encouraging. Improvement stories are easier to tell honestly once you’re clear about how wide the starting gap actually is.
The starting point: a market wide look, not a handful of anecdotes
Individual company success stories are common in accessibility marketing, and they’re worth reading skeptically unless the source and methodology are clear. Wawsome’s Romanian scan is useful precisely because it isn’t a cherry picked anecdote: it’s a look across many company websites in one market, at one point in time, checked against basic accessibility criteria. The finding, that around 90% still failed, tells you something a single glowing case study can’t: that whatever progress is happening in individual businesses hasn’t yet moved the market wide number very far, more than a year after the relevant law took effect.
What “failing basic checks” usually means in practice
Neither the scan itself nor broader accessibility research suggests these are unusual or exotic failures. Industry wide data like the WebAIM Million 2026 study, which tested the top one million home pages globally, found the most common problems are mundane: 83.9% of pages had low contrast text, and the average page carried 56.1 detectable errors. There’s no strong reason to think a market wide scan of Romanian company sites would find a fundamentally different mix. The pattern across markets tends to be the same handful of issues repeated at scale, not one business’s unique failure.
An illustrative example, not a documented real company
The following is a hypothetical, illustrative scenario meant to show what remediation typically looks like in practice. It does not describe an actual named business, and it should not be read as a verified case study.
Picture a mid-sized furniture retailer selling online across two or three EU countries. A basic accessibility check would likely turn up low contrast product prices and sale badges, product images with missing or unhelpful alt text, a checkout form with unlabeled fields, and a filter menu that only works with a mouse. None of that is unusual, and none of it requires a rebuild. The contrast and alt text issues are typically fixable in days once someone is looking for them. The checkout form and filter menu, because they involve custom interactive components, typically take longer and need someone testing with a keyboard and screen reader directly, not just an automated scan, to confirm the fix actually works for someone using assistive technology.
What tends to improve fastest, and what takes longer
Across the accessibility field generally, a consistent pattern shows up regardless of country or industry: static, visual issues like color contrast and missing alt text improve fastest, because they’re cheap to detect and cheap to fix once flagged. Structural and interactive issues, custom dropdowns, multi step forms, single page app navigation, take longer because they require someone to actually test with a keyboard or screen reader rather than just run an automated scanner. That’s a large part of why continuous monitoring, rather than a one time audit, matters: a site that passed a check six months ago can easily have regressed if a new feature shipped without accessibility testing built into the process.
What documented improvement generally requires
Beyond the illustrative scenario above, the general pattern that shows up across accessibility remediation work, regardless of country, is that progress tends to happen in stages rather than as a single project with a clean finish line. An initial audit or scan identifies the obvious issues. A first pass fixes the cheap, high-frequency ones. A second, slower pass addresses interactive components that need actual testing with assistive technology. And ongoing monitoring, rather than a single certificate of completion, is what keeps a site from quietly regressing as new pages and features get added. Businesses that treat accessibility as a one-time project tend to show up again in a later scan with new issues, since a site that passed a check a year ago can easily have drifted since, especially if new features shipped without accessibility testing built into the release process.
Why so few businesses have gotten there yet
The gap the Romanian scan documents isn’t unique to Romania, even though that’s the market with sourced data available. It reflects a pattern that shows up in accessibility research generally: legal deadlines and public awareness tend to move faster than the actual remediation work gets done. A law taking effect creates an obligation. It doesn’t, by itself, create the internal process, budget, or testing habit that turns that obligation into a site that actually works for disabled visitors. Closing that gap looks less like a single dramatic fix and more like the unglamorous version described above: contrast, alt text, and form labels addressed quickly, followed by an ongoing habit of testing new features before they ship rather than after a complaint or an audit finds the problem.