Accessibility is a hot topic. How do you make your website usable by everyone, no matter whether they have 20/20 vision, poor vision, colorblindness, or other impairments like inability to use a mouse. How do you make your site legally complaint under the ADA, and how do you keep from being sued?
We do a lot of work to help our clients make their websites accessible, and there are a lot of commercial products available to “help” you to do this with “no work” involved. We routinely have clients approach us about helping them implement these tools, commonly called overlays. We have consulted directly with WebAim, who told us:
In a nutshell, […] overlays overpromise and underdeliver. Although the allure of an “instant fix” can be superficially tempting, most of the features they offer (stronger contrast, larger text, etc.) are changes that a user can make in their browser or operating system already—and will have, if needed. Others, such as injected skip links, can be easily created by developers. However, the finer points of accessibility (writing alternative text, crafting a heading structure, designing a responsive layout) require human judgment and cannot be reliably automated. Finally, in our testing these add-ons often generate accessibility barriers of their own and add complexity that compromises usability for everyone.
John Northup, WebAim
WebAim refers interested parties to the Overlay Fact Sheet, signed by over 700 accessibility professionals and experts, which states:
Many users with disabilities have expressed strong words of dissatisfaction with overlay products. As shown below, overlays themselves may have accessibility problems significant enough for users to take steps to actively block overlays from appearing at all.
WebAim, which provides testing for website accessibility, refuses to review websites with overlays turned on.
The New York Times investigated this issue in 2022 in an article called For Blind Internet Users, the Fix Can Be Worse Than the Flaws, which states:
Companies say their A.I.-powered tools are the best way to fix accessibility problems online, but many blind people find they make websites harder to use.
In the New York Times article, a blind user states:
“I’ve not yet found a single one that makes my life better,” said Mr. Perdue, 38, who lives in Queens. He added,
“I spend more time working around these overlays than I actually do navigating the website.”
It’s helpful to keep in mind that these are businesses that have the primary goal of making money. They are powered primarily by AI which is not making nuanced human-like decisions, and they modify what is on the site in a programmatic way that often undermines the decisions that an accessibility savvy development team uses their time and expertise to implement. They also render industry-standard accessibility testing tools, like WAVE, inaccurate.
This is a great summary of all of the reasons overlays are not a good route to making your website accessible, and it has a robust index of references: https://www.accessibility.works/blog/tools-toolbar-plugins/
It’s a great read, and some of the most impactful points are:
- “We still get frequent inquiries from companies that have been sued while using an overlay.”
- 25% (1,023) of all state and federal accessibility lawsuits targeted websites using overlay and in such suits, overlays were cited as barriers instead of solutions.
- The Federal Trade Commission fined a leading overlay provider accessiBe $1M for false advertising and paid reviews that pose as real customers.
- Even in 2025 AI, no overlay widget can currently make a website WCAG compliant. They’re automated, so they miss 70% of WCAG issues.
- Overlays (Negatively) Affect the Users’ Existing Assistive Technology Tools
- Overlay Widgets Can Introduce New WCAG Violations
This is also a good read: https://litzdigital.com/blog/4-reasons-an-overlay-widget-will-not-solve-your-accessibility-woes/
Some of the links we have included here are from a few years ago, like the NYT article, and web years are like dog years, so they seem dated, but this is from 2025: FTC orders AI accessibility startup accessiBe to pay $1M for misleading advertising
And in addition to being fined by the FTC, they are also facing a class action lawsuit from their customers: https://www.classaction.org/news/accessibe-lawsuit-claims-ai-web-accessibility-software-cant-ensure-ada-compliance-as-advertised. From the article:
“The lawsuit goes so far as to argue that businesses are more likely to be sued if they use accessiBe’s products because its widget interferes with accessibility technology tools widely used by people with disabilities to browse the internet.
Per the complaint, the defendant also deceptively promises businesses that it will provide legal support should they get hit with litigation over alleged ADA violations.
“In truth, [accessiBe] provides no substantive legal support,” the filing contends. “A business that faces a lawsuit must then spend thousands of dollars on legal fees to defend against the very lawsuit from which [accessiBe] promised to shield.””
We feel very strongly, after reviewing resources like the ones linked here, that these tools are not the best way to make websites accessible. The users who are supposed to “benefit” from them are often further confused, frustrated or inconvenienced by them, accessibility experts abhor them and continuously warn against their use, and the well-meaning people that employ them think they are doing something helpful, when in reality they are paying for a service that is not needed if a website is well-built and which may undermine accessibility and possibly expose their customers to increased changes of being sued.
So, our position at MIGHTYminnow, as always, is to build websites properly, to be as accessible as possible, and to let users use their preferred tools to navigate the websites instead of forcing a new tool upon them.
Accessibility is a spectrum. No website will ever be perfect for every user. But if accessibility is an area of interest or concern for you, we’d be happy to help talk to you about evaluating and improving your website, and walk you through the tools we used and our thinking throughout the process.
