Do accessibility overlays work?

The short answer

No, not in the way they are sold. An overlay is a piece of JavaScript added to a website, usually with one line of code, that puts an accessibility button on every page. Behind the button is a toolbar: bigger text, higher contrast, a reading guide, a way to pause animations and, in some products, profiles named after different disabilities. Some overlays also try to repair the page's code automatically as it loads, guessing alt text for images and labels for form fields.

The toolbar mostly repeats what visitors' own phones and computers already do. The automatic repairs are guesses, and a wrong guess can be worse than nothing. Neither changes the website underneath, so the barriers a demand letter lists are still there for the people who meet them.

In January 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission announced a case against accessiBe, one of the best-known overlay sellers, over claims that its widget could make any website meet WCAG, and it approved a final order that April. Accessibility specialists and European disability groups have said publicly that overlays do not make a site accessible or compliant.

If you have one, there is no need to panic. You need to know what it is not doing for you, and then fix the site itself.

What the FTC and the Justice Department have said

The FTC's complaint said that accessiBe's product, accessWidget, did not make all of its customers' websites WCAG compliant, and that the company's claims that it could were false, misleading or unsubstantiated. It also said the company had presented articles and reviews as independent opinions without disclosing its connections to the people behind them.

The final order, approved by a 3-0 vote on 22 April 2025, bars accessiBe from claiming that its products can make any website WCAG compliant, or keep a site compliant over time, unless it has evidence to back the claim. It also bars the company from presenting reviews and endorsements as independent when they are not, and it required a payment to the FTC.

The order is about one company's marketing. It does not ban overlays, and it does not say that a site with an overlay breaks the law. What it shows is that the main sales claim, compliance through one line of code, was not one the seller could support with evidence.

The Justice Department's 2022 guidance on web accessibility takes a cooler view than the sales pages. It says automated checkers and overlays can be helpful tools but, like spelling and grammar checkers, need to be used carefully, and that a clean report does not necessarily mean a site is accessible.

What an overlay cannot fix

An overlay works on the page in the visitor's browser after the page loads. It cannot know what your images mean or what your form is for, and some content is out of its reach entirely. These are the gaps:

• Software can guess alt text such as "a person standing in a room". It cannot write "Our hygienist in treatment room two, which has step-free access". The words that matter have to come from you.
• A guessed label on a booking form can be wrong, and an error shown only as a red border stays invisible to a screen reader user.
• Menus, sliders, date pickers and pop-ups built without keyboard support often stay unusable, and focus can still jump around or get trapped.
• Videos stay without captions, because an overlay cannot write them or describe what happens on screen.
• A menu, a price list or a form uploaded as a PDF is outside its reach.
• A booking widget, payment page or map that loads in a frame from another company's server cannot be changed by a script on your page.
• Each new page, product or photo you add needs its own alt text and structure, and the overlay has to guess again.

The Overlay Fact Sheet, a statement signed by accessibility specialists and disabled users, comes to the same conclusion: an overlay may improve a few criteria, but full compliance cannot be achieved with one.

One booking form, with and without an overlay

Take the booking form of a small physiotherapy clinic. Its three fields have grey placeholder text instead of labels, its date picker opens only with a mouse click, and when the phone number is too short the field simply turns red.

With an overlay installed, a screen reader user reaching the first field hears a label only if the overlay guessed one, and a guess built from placeholder text can be wrong or missing. The date picker often still does not open from the keyboard, because automatic repairs are unreliable for custom controls like this one. The red border still says nothing. The toolbar offers bigger text, which this visitor did not need.

Fixed at the source, each field has a visible label above it, the date field uses a picker that works with the arrow keys, and the error says "Enter a phone number with the area code" next to the field and is announced when the form is sent. The change is made once, in one template, and it helps every visitor, including someone booking on a cracked phone screen in bright sunlight.

Why many disabled users object to them

People who rely on screen readers, magnifiers or switch controls have set up their own tools the way they need them. Accounts collected by the Overlay Fact Sheet describe overlays that change what a screen reader announces, move the focus, interrupt reading and mislabel content. Some users block overlays altogether.

In June 2021 the National Federation of the Blind, a US organisation of blind people, revoked accessiBe's sponsorship of its national convention, saying the company's behaviour harmed blind people. In May 2023 the European Disability Forum and the International Association of Accessibility Professionals issued a joint statement saying that overlays do not make a website accessible or compliant with European law, and that they can interfere with users' own assistive technology and override their settings.

There is a privacy point too. Some overlays detect when a screen reader is running. The joint statement warns that this tells a website something sensitive about a visitor's disability, and that some products give no way to opt out.

An overlay does not stop a demand letter

Businesses with overlays installed have been sued. In January 2021 a blind shopper sued Eyebobs, an online glasses retailer, in federal court in Pennsylvania. His complaint said the shop had installed accessiBe's overlay and that the site still blocked screen reader users. It also quoted accessiBe's own terms of service, which warned that installing the product did not mean claims would not arise.

A screen reader user meets the site as it is. Missing alt text, an unlabelled form and a menu that a keyboard cannot open are the barriers letters list, and an overlay running on top does not remove them.

If an overlay plan comes with a promise of legal support, ask in writing what it covers: who pays, who defends you and whether the support goes beyond the overlay maker's own costs.

How to tell whether your site has one

Overlays are sold as plugins and as apps for website builders and store platforms, so one may have arrived with something installed years ago. Check:

• A small round button with a person icon in a corner of every page, often labelled Accessibility.
• The list of apps or plugins in your website builder, your store or your WordPress dashboard.
• Your card statements and invoices for a yearly subscription with a name you do not recognise.
• The page code. Whoever looks after your site can search it for the overlay's script.

If you find one, note what it costs and when it renews, so you can cancel it in time once the site itself is fixed.

If you already pay for one

You do not have to remove it today. Work through this instead:

• Switch it off on a copy of the site, or for an hour on a quiet day, and run the checks in the next section. What you find is what the overlay was covering.
• List the barriers by page, starting with booking, contact and checkout.
• Fix them in the site itself: the theme, the content and the forms.
• Once the fixes are in, remove the overlay and test again with a screen reader, so you know the site works without it.
• Check the renewal date and the notice period in your contract, and cancel before the next term.

If a salesperson tells you an overlay is the only way to avoid a lawsuit, ask for that promise in writing, with what happens if it fails.

What to do instead on a small site

Small sites are built from a handful of templates, so fixing the header, the menu, the footer and the form once improves every page. A sensible order:

• Run a free checker such as WAVE or Lighthouse on each type of page and fix what it flags.
• Make every part usable with a keyboard, with focus you can see.
• Fix colour contrast in the theme settings rather than page by page.
• Give every form field a visible label and write error messages in words.
• Write real alt text for the photos that carry information, and an empty alt for decoration.
• Caption your videos and turn PDF menus and price lists into pages.
• Test once with VoiceOver or TalkBack before you call it done.

Our guide to ADA website accessibility explains each of these checks with the WCAG criterion behind it, and what to do if a demand letter arrives. If you sell to consumers in Europe, read about the European Accessibility Act too.

Visitors who want bigger text or more contrast already have the tools. Every modern browser zooms, and phones have text size, contrast and screen reader settings built in. A site that respects those settings does more for them than a toolbar that copies them.

Builders, themes and plugins that promise compliance

Overlays are not the only shortcut on offer. Website builders, themes and plugins sometimes call themselves accessible or compliant. Treat that as a starting point: a good theme gets the structure right, and then the colours you choose, the images you upload and the forms you add decide the rest.

Ask the seller which WCAG version and level they tested against, and whether they publish a conformance report. For an online store, test the product page, the basket and the checkout with a keyboard before you commit to a theme.

Test a chat button, booking tool or review widget the same way as your own pages. An AI chatbot window that a keyboard cannot open or close is a barrier on every page it appears on.

Fixing the site compared with paying for an overlay

An overlay is a subscription that renews every year and leaves the site as it was. Fixing the site is mostly a one-off piece of work, plus a habit: checking new pages, photos and videos as you add them.

What decides the cost of the fixes is the number of different templates, how custom the interactive parts are and how much content needs alt text or captions. A small service business on a modern theme often needs changes rather than a rebuild. A site on an old theme with custom sliders and menus can cost more to patch than to rebuild, and that is a decision to make with a website redesign quote in front of you.

If you are weighing up a rebuild, our prices page shows what a GGSites website costs and what it includes. Whoever does the work, put the WCAG target and the testing in the contract, so the result does not depend on a widget.