Online shop accessibility and Romania's Law No. 232/2022: a practical plan
· 5 min read
Law No. 232/2022 requires online shops in Romania that sell to consumers and are not microenterprises to offer an accessible website and to publish information about accessibility. The requirements apply from 28 June 2025, supervision of e-commerce falls to ADR, and the law provides for fines between 5,000 and 15,000 lei. Below you will find a realistic work plan, without panic and without impossible promises.
Why online shop accessibility matters
An accessible shop is one where any customer can find a product, add it to the cart and pay, whether they use a mouse, only a keyboard, a screen reader or text magnification. Think of older customers, people with low vision, someone with an arm in a cast, or a user browsing on a small phone in bright sunlight.
Law No. 232/2022 turned this into a requirement for some shops. But even where the law does not apply, the same fixes reduce cart abandonment and make the site easier to use for everyone.
Step 1: find out whether the law applies to you
The law does not apply to every website. Three conditions must all be met:
- you sell to consumers, not only to businesses;
- you operate in a covered sector, and e-commerce is one of them;
- the company is not a microenterprise within the meaning of the EAA.
The microenterprise part is the one most often misunderstood. A company is exempt if it has fewer than 10 employees and either its turnover or its balance sheet total does not exceed EUR 2 million. A high turnover on its own does not take you out of the exemption. We wrote a separate article on who must comply and how the threshold is calculated; the short version is in the guide who the EAA affects.
If the result is "unclear", talk to your accountant and a lawyer before you invest in the topic or ignore it.
Step 2: take a snapshot of the current state
Do not start with a redesign. Start with a list of existing problems on the pages every buyer goes through:
- the home page;
- a category with filters;
- a product page;
- the cart;
- the checkout and payment page;
- account creation and login;
- the contact page and the returns form.
An automated check quickly gives you a first list: insufficient contrast, images without alternative text, fields without labels, buttons without names. You can start with the free check of one page. Keep in mind, though: automated tests find only some of the problems. The rest has to be checked manually, with the keyboard and, ideally, with a screen reader.
Step 3: set priorities
Not all problems carry the same weight. A practical order:
- Does it block the order? A "Place order" button that cannot be activated with the keyboard, or an address field without a label. These come first.
- Does it affect many pages? A low-contrast text colour in the shop theme appears everywhere; a single CSS fix resolves hundreds of occurrences.
- Does it affect content? Alternative text for product images is fixed gradually, starting with the best-selling products.
Step 4: fix it in the theme, not on top of the theme
Most problems come from the shop theme and the installed apps. In Shopify, WooCommerce or PrestaShop, the typical fixes are:
- text and button colours with sufficient contrast;
- visible labels on the checkout form fields;
- accessible names for icon buttons (cart, search, favourites, close);
- visible focus when navigating with the keyboard;
- pop-ups (newsletter, cookies) that can be closed with the keyboard and do not cover the focus.
Avoid widget-type shortcuts that "fix" the site with one line of code. We explained why in the article on accessibility widgets.
Step 5: publish the accessibility information
The law requires the service provider to publish information on how the service meets the accessibility requirements, in the general terms and conditions or in an equivalent document. In practice, a dedicated page linked from the footer and from the terms and conditions. What it must contain and which mistakes to avoid is covered in the article on the accessibility statement. The final text must be checked by a lawyer.
Step 6: do not stop after the first fix
Accessibility breaks easily: an updated theme, a new reviews app, a Black Friday banner. That is why a regular check makes sense, for example weekly, which alerts you when new problems appear.
What we know about inspections and fines
Supervision of e-commerce services falls to the Romanian Authority for Digitalization (ADR). The law provides for fines between 5,000 and 15,000 lei. As of October 2026 we are not aware of confirmed fines imposed on online shops under this law. In other member states there have already been inspections, for example in Czechia, as well as consumer complaints and lawsuits, for example in France. The trend is clear: the topic is not going away.
You will find more legal detail in the guide to Law No. 232/2022.
A realistic timeline
| Period | What you do |
|---|---|
| Week 1 | EAA filter, automated check of key pages |
| Weeks 2–4 | Critical fixes in the theme: contrast, labels, buttons, focus |
| Month 2 | Manual keyboard check, alternative text for the main products |
| Months 2–3 | Accessibility information, checked by a lawyer |
| Ongoing | Monitoring after every update |
How we can help
Our service automatically checks the site against WCAG 2.2 AA, explains each problem in plain language and shows how to fix it on your platform. We repeat the check every week. It is an automated check, not a full audit, and it is not legal advice. For a complete list of manual checks, use the WCAG 2.2 checklist.