Key Concepts

Accessibility Overlays

7 min read

As accessibility lawsuits increase, and awareness around the importance of digital accessibility rises, the number of businesses implementing accessibility overlays have increased as well. Accessibility overlays are marketed as a comprehensive “solution” to ensuring legal compliance. While these tools often offer impressive statements, touting benefits like “100% compliance” and a seemingly impressive range of functionality, many of their marketing claims are largely impossible. Across the industry most experts, advocates, and individuals with disabilities widely recommend that businesses should avoid adding these tools to their websites.

How accessibility overlays work

These products are usually a snipped of code, called a script, that gets added directly to a website’s code or injected via plugin. They typically add a floating action button, or similar element, onto the website. This button then opens a menu of accessibility options such as changing the individual website’s text size, contrast, cursor size, and more.

What accessibility overlays claim

Accessibility overlays are often marketed to small businesses as a fast, affordable, one-time solution to accessibility compliance. The promises made by these companies are enticing—but often promise a level of result, or compliance, that would be difficult if not impossible for any website to actually achieve and effectively maintain. These claims typically involve things like:

Automatically detecting and repairing accessibility without changing the underlying website.
Providing complete WCAG compliance or protection from ADA related lawsuits.
Replacing the need for any manual remediation or development support.

The reality of accessibility overlays

Despite the enticing promises, accessibility overlays are widely considered—by leading universities, accessibility organizations, and individuals with disabilities—to be completely ineffectual. In fact, having an accessibility overlay on your website can actually block disabled user’s existing accessibility devices and open your business up to additional legal risk.

What overlays can do

While most of the promises advertised are false claims, accessibility overlays are able to do things like:

Provide some user facing controls—such as the ability to change the web page’s font-size, color contrast, and disable animations/moving content.
Catch some common automatically detectable issues.

Even with these legitimate features, an accessibility overlay doesn’t provide value. The accessibility settings to modify the display of your website’s front-end already exist at the device’s browser level and allow a user to have their accessibility preferences applied across their entire web browsing experience. The majority of disabled users do not need or want to have to apply these adaptations to every website individually—not to mention the overrides from an accessibility overlay can wind up conflicting with a user’s existing browser accommodations.

As for the ability to automatically flag those high level accessibility issues, there are better tools that exist. Numerous, highly reputable, free tools are already available to run an automated audit of your website—just remember that any automated accessibility scan still won’t catch 100% of problems.

What overlays cannot do

One of the main reasons we, and most experts (other than companies selling these tools) advise against using accessibility overlays is due to how little, if any, value they actually provide. The claims may sound enticing, but the FTC has recently filed charges against one such tool for misrepresentation, and we expect others will follow. It’s important to be aware of some of the biggest promises that accessibility overlays can’t actually deliver on.

Claim: Accessibility overlays will fix issues on your website.

Reality: Depending on the issue, accessibility overlays may be able to inject code that appears to fix an accessibility issue, but they are far from comprehensive solutions, and the root issues remains on your underlying website. This means that any positive changes the overlay does make aren’t permenant—if the company shuts down or if you choose to change tools, you’ll loose any of the “corrections” they had claimed to provide. We recommend that money is invested in fixing issues directly within your site instead.

Claim: Accessibility overlays can provide 100% compliance.

Reality: There is no AI, or accessibility overlay that can reliably interpret the purpose and context of content like images, forms, or other interactive elements. Manual, human review is still needed for this part of accessibility evaluations.

Reality: Individuals who rely on these alternative navigation tools already have dedicated software and devices they use; they do not want to switch to your website’s individual on-site tools. Not to mention, overlays can interfere with their ability to use their preferred tools at all, and there are numerous structural, semantic, or contextual aspects of a screen-reader or keyboard accessible experience that an accessibility overlay simply won’t be able to identify or inject adequate support for.

The case against accessibility overlays

Evidence from the accessibility community

1. Experts advice against using accessibility overlays

Numerous legal experts, like disability rights lawyer Lainey Feinfold, advises against implementing accessibility add-ons, and hundreds of accessibility professionals have endorsed public statements like the Overlay Fact Sheet, cautioning against their use.

2. Surveys show accessibility overlays don’t work

Individuals with disabilities and users of assistive technology consistently report that overlays are ineffective—with evidence showing they can actually cause more issues then they solve. According to a survey from WebAIM 72% of respondents with disabilities rated these add-ons as not at all, or not very effective. The Perkins School for the Blindlists specific concerns about accessibility overlays such as introducing problems that didn’t exist, creating privacy concerns, and exposing private details about user’s disability status and specifics.

3. Accessibility overlays consistently fail accessibility testing

Testing results from the University of Michigan found that along with failing to fix most accessibility issues overlays were also likely to introduce additional issues and accessibility barriers. These issues include:

Disrupting users preferred browser settings
Preventing use of existing accessibility tools
Inserting incorrect labels for fields or interactive elements
Causing unpredictable conflicts with existing website code, blocking existing content and functionality, and crashing pages
Creating privacy and security issues by introducing website vulnerabilities and collecting information about user’s assistive technology use without their consent.

Evidence from the legal record

1. Increasing legal action against accessibility overlay companies

The claims made by companies promoting accessibility overlays are blatantly false, and the courts have begun to take notice. in 2022 ADP settled a lawsuit related to their use of an accessibility overlay and barriers it create that prevented blind individuals to use the website independently. Ultimately, ADP agreed to end its overlay use, made substantial improvements to it’s website compliance in accordance to WCAG standards, and brought in an outside expert to work directly with users with disabilities to improve the solution.

In other scenarios like the 2024 class action lawsuit against the accessibility overlay provider AccessiBe, companies who have been negatively impacted by the ineffectiveness of accessibility overlays are starting to fight..

2. Relying on accessibility overlays leaves your business open to lawsuits

According to AudioEye almost 40% of companies sued for website accessibility compliance already had an accessibility tool—like an accessibility overlay—in place. Implementing these services does not decrease your business’s legal, if anything it opens up new ways to increase it.

3. The DOJ recommends against relying on accessibility overlays

While the DOJ’s web accessibility guidance does not explicitly address the negative implications of accessibility tools, they do caution that businesses should be careful with how they utilize the services. Any automated accessibility tool should not be used in isolation, but rather paired with manual testing and custom remediation.

Why accessibility overlays are being used

These services lure businesses, often those with lower-budgets and limited resources, with promises of an affordable, easy solution to WCAG compliance. The companies behind accessibility overlays often use legal-sounding language and the results of simple, automated testing to falsify their effectiveness—while hiding the more subjective or contextual aspects of compliance.

As a result, business owners are given a false sense of confidence as to the accessibility of their website. Many stop here, not realizing their accessibility issues have not been solved. Achieving legitimate accessibility is not a one-size-fits all solution; it requires ongoing attention, custom evaluations, and intentional solutions.

The risk of false confidence

One of our main concerns for businesses that rely on accessibility overlays is not that they’ll fail compliance—they will—it’s that they give business owners and teams a false sense of security. If you believe your website accessibility issues have been solved you’ll stop looking for problems and concerns. This can often delay actual remediation until there is a demand letter or lawsuit, at which point the cost and the repercussions are much more severe.

What to do instead of using accessibility overlays

Layering tools on top of your website will only further complicate its accessibility and delay actual remediation. The best path to genuine accessibility is to fix issues within the website’s underlying code and content. Instead of investing money in a tool that provides little to no real value, focus your efforts on the following:

1. Perform an audit:

Conduct an automated accessibility test alongside of manual testing to evaluate for legitimate problems and scope potential solutions.

2. Prioritize remediation:

Legal risk often increases related to the impact an issue creates. As such, you should work to remediate the most severe accessibility issues first—especially if you are working under resource or budget constraints.

3. Collect user feedback:

A careful accessibility statement, and genuine process of collecting user feedback for remediation will be more impactful (and likely cost effective) than any accessibility overlay or other add-on.

4. Budget appropriately:

ADA compliance is a requirement for your business—and should be prioritized like any other necessary expenses. Make sure you adjust your budget to allow for regular, routine, and ongoing accessibility attention; it’s not a one-time expense.

Why understanding accessibility overlays matter for small businesses

Accessibility overlays are one of the most aggressively marketed—and least effective—products in the accessibility space; often preying on business owner’s fear of legal risk and lack of knowledge. Accessibility overlays provide such little remediation value you are effectively throwing away money that could be spent on actual remediation and accessibility improvements. If you do choose to purchase an accessibility overlay, or other add-on, you should be informed as to what it is actually able to provide for your website vs. what it cannot—this is the difference between reducing risk and creating it.