EAGLE SOLUTIONS
In short: The automated axe-core test found at least one WCAG 2.1 A/AA error on 96% of 77 Harghita company homepages, with a median of 3 error types per page. The most common were low contrast (77%) and links without an accessible name (69%).
Some accessibility errors can be detected by a machine: text that is too faint, a link with no label, an image with no description. In the seventh part of the series on the websites of 100 companies in Harghita County, I tested 77 company homepages with an automated accessibility tool.
One important point first: automated testing finds only a minority of accessibility problems. Whether a site works with a keyboard, or whether an image description makes sense, is not something a program can decide. So zero errors does not mean compliance either, only that the rules a machine can check are met.
How I measured
The measurement was taken on 27 September 2026. The sample: the 50 largest companies in Harghita County from the Termene 2025 revenue ranking, and 50 small businesses from different sectors. Of the 81 working websites, the test ran without errors on 77, and the numbers refer to those. For each site I loaded the homepage in a Playwright-based browser and ran the open-source axe-core engine, limited to WCAG 2.1 level A and AA rules.
Limits:
- I tested only the homepage, not subpages, forms or the checkout.
- The test ran in a desktop view (a 1280-pixel-wide window).
- I counted each error type once per page, however many elements it affected.
- The small-business half contains only companies with a working website.
Accessibility errors in numbers
- axe-core found at least one error on 74 of the 77 homepages (96%).
- All 74 have at least one error type rated serious or critical.
- The median is 3 different error types per page.
- Errors turned up on 26 of 27 large-company homepages and 48 of 50 small-business ones. No difference there.
The four most common errors
Low contrast (59 websites, 77%). The text colour is too close to the background colour. WCAG asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text. A visitor with low vision, an older visitor, or anyone reading a phone in the sun will struggle. The fix is usually a slightly darker text colour or a lighter background.
Links without a name (53 websites, 69%). The link is just an icon or an image, with no text and no label. A screen reader then says only "link", or reads out the URL. The usual suspects are the social icons in the footer and the logo link. Fix: an aria-label on the link, or alt text on the image inside it.
Blocked zoom (16 websites, 21%). The page's meta viewport tag disables or limits zooming (user-scalable=no or a low maximum-scale). On a phone, visitors cannot pinch to enlarge the text. Fix: remove those two settings, which is usually a single line in the theme header.
Images without alt text (15 websites, 19%). The image has no text description, so a screen reader reads the file name or skips it. Fix: a short alt text describing the content for meaningful images, and an empty alt="" for decorative ones.
Further down the list are rarer errors of the same kind: buttons without a label (10 websites), embedded maps or videos without a title (9), links that differ from the surrounding text only by colour (7) and form fields without a label (6).
What an automated test cannot see
axe-core checks what can be decided unambiguously from the code. It cannot tell you:
- whether the site can be used with a keyboard (Tab, Enter) and whether you can see where the focus is;
- whether the
alttext makes sense or just says "image1"; - whether the page is still usable at 200% zoom;
- whether pop-ups, menus and form error messages make sense with a screen reader.
These have to be tried by hand. So the measurement is a lower bound: where the automated tool found errors, there is certainly work to do, and where it found none, there may still be some.
Who is legally required to comply?
In Romania, Law 232/2022 has made accessibility mandatory since 28 June 2025 for certain products and services, including online stores, with an exemption for micro-enterprises. I explained in detail who it applies to and who it does not. The technical benchmark is the W3C WCAG guidelines. Even if the law does not apply to you, fixing the four errors above is cheap and makes the site better for every visitor.
A five-minute self-check
- Open your site and move through it using only the Tab key: can you always see where you are?
- On your phone, try to pinch-zoom the text. Does it let you?
- Is the light grey text on a white background readable in sunlight?
- Do the social icons and the logo have a text label?
- Run the Lighthouse accessibility audit in your browser's developer tools: it uses the same axe-core engine.
If you would like me to look at your website, send me the address. The websites I build target WCAG AA, and in a website takeover these errors are among the first things I fix.
