There are companies out there that claim they can improve the accessibility of your website with a single line of code or tool, which is referred to as an overlay. They also claim they can make your site compliant with rules that don’t exist and that they will support you if you are sued. That sounds like a miracle cure, right?
What automated accessibility tools can find is limited and these overlays don’t solve your problems. The European Disability Forum and International Association of Accessibility Professionals issued a joint statement on accessibility overlays saying they don’t meet legal requirements. Overlays also frequently break websites, making them less functional.
The European Commission’s Web Accessibility page specifically highlights that overlays are not the solution.
Overlays, or any other tools which do not ensure the website itself meets the detailed criteria of the standard, are not an appropriate solution. It is best to fix accessibility issues at their source.
In a 2025 Order, the US Federal Trade Commission stated that Accessibe had made false claims in their advertising and did not make websites WCAG compliant.
We examine the issues with the claim that a company can provide an instant fix for making your website accessible so that you can avoid trusting a service that you shouldn’t.
What is an accessibility overlay?
Accessibility overlays. There are many companies out there promising to make your website instantly accessible by just adding a line of code. That’s a huge claim. So how true is it? Before we get started, an accessibility overlay is a broad term for technology that tries to improve the accessibility of a website.
They apply third party code to make modifications to the front end code of the website. They don’t actually modify the back end code or change anything that was built.
First, let’s look at the claim. They are saying that with the billions of possible ways to code websites, their tool can fix all of them. Well, if it sounds too good to be true, It usually is. I have looked at the websites for several of these tools, and their tools don’t work on their own websites.
For example, on several tools that I visited, the Stop Animations feature didn’t actually stop the animations. They continued to loop. On others, stopping the animations made the elements that were animated no longer interactive. For example, an animated carousel no longer had functional buttons to navigate the carousel once stop animations was applied.
That’s a problem. So their tools broke their own websites. If their tools can’t work on their own sites, how well do you think it’s going to work on yours?
Can your website become “ADA compliant”?
The next part of their claim is that they can make your website ADA Title III compliant. The ADA is the Americans with Disabilities Act, and Title III refers to the part about private businesses. ADA compliance is checked in the physical world by determining if a business location meets the specific set of rules that the United States Department of Justice or DOJ has set.
For example, on a wheelchair ramp, there is an allowed slope or how steep the ramp is. You measure the slope of the ramp and it’s either within the rules the DOJ set or it’s not. Since they have rules, you can comply with those rules.
Unfortunately, the DOJ has never released specific pass fail rules for the ADA as it applies to websites. Since there are no rules, you can’t conform with rules that don’t exist. No one can make an ADA Title III compliant site because the DOJ just hasn’t made any rules. So claiming that they can make your website compliant is a significant red flag.
The legal side of accessibility
The next thing most of these solutions claim is that they will support you if you are sued. If you dig into their documentation on the support they actually offer, it is limited to audits done by their team and responses regarding those audits. They do not offer any legal counsel, nor do they offer anything for legal fees.
And a typical case against a small business can easily involve more than $20,000 in legal fees.
We are on the legal topic, let’s talk about Europe quickly.
In Europe, the European Disability Forum, in conjunction with the International Association of Accessibility Professionals, released a joint statement in 2023.
To quote directly from this statement, “Website owners who are not digital accessibility specialists may be led to believe that overlays can fix the accessibility of a website, which is not the case. Overlays do not make the website accessible or compliant with European accessibility legislation. They do not constitute an acceptable alternative or substitute for fixing the website itself.”
That’s a very clear statement from Europe. Overlays don’t fix websites. Overlays don’t make websites accessible or compliant.
Accessibility overlay tools are limited
Now, let’s look at some more legal aspects. In several lawsuits, the accessibility overlay was cited as a key problem. The overlay literally broke the site and made it unusable for some people. In my personal experience, I’ve seen this happen. For example, a website that had a main menu that was keyboard accessible and working became inaccessible when the overlay was installed.
A keyboard user was no longer able to open the main menu and navigate. So why would that happen? Why would installing an overlay break a working site? Well, I like to look for data. So I looked at a study where over 13,000 webpages were scanned with automated software, and were manually audited by trained people.
In that study, automated testing was able to find less than 3 percent of keyboard issues. If automated testing can find less than 3 percent of the keyboard issues, that certainly explains why the overlay wouldn’t know that it broke the main menu.
Because the overlay just can’t detect over 97 percent of keyboard problems.
I’ve encountered numerous other problems caused by overlays. And when I reference studies on what automation can and can’t detect, the issues were almost always things that automation is shown to be very poor at detecting. So clearly, the European Disability Forum is correct. Overlays do not make the website accessible.
The next time you see marketing claiming compliance with rules that don’t exist, or just making claims that sound too good to be true, know that those are huge red flags. And I would avoid working with companies like that.
Thanks for watching. I’m Gen Herres from the Easy A11y Guide, where we try to make web accessibility easier to implement through done-for-you tools and processes. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up, and you can subscribe to our channel for more accessibility tips. For more information on web accessibility, including tools, tutorials, and more, please visit easyA11yguide. com. I look forward to seeing you again soon.