In April 2025, the Federal Trade Commission did something the accessibility industry had been waiting years for someone to do. It looked at accessiBe – the largest, loudest seller of one-line-of-code “compliance” – and called the pitch what it was: false.

The order required accessiBe to pay $1 million and barred the company from claiming its automated tool could make any website WCAG-compliant unless it had the evidence to prove it. The specific claim the FTC went after is worth quoting, because you’ve almost certainly seen a version of it: installing “one line of code” makes a website compliant with 30% of WCAG requirements immediately, and an AI process handles the remaining 70% within 48 hours.

It doesn’t. It never did. And if you’re running an overlay on your site right now because someone sold you that promise, this post is for you.

What an accessibility overlay/widget actually is

An accessibility overlay (often referred to as a widget) is a piece of third-party JavaScript you drop onto your site that claims to detect and fix accessibility problems automatically – usually paired with a little floating icon that opens a menu of font-size and contrast controls. accessiBe, UserWay, AudioEye, EqualWeb, and a few dozen others all sell variations on this model.

Here’s the part the marketing leaves out. The overlay runs after your page loads. It injects its changes on top of your existing code rather than fixing the code itself. And that single architectural fact is the reason the whole category fails the people it claims to serve.

Screen readers like JAWS, NVDA, and VoiceOver build their understanding of your page from your HTML source. By the time an overlay’s script wakes up and starts rearranging things, the assistive technology has often already done its work – reading the broken version. The overlay is patching a wall the screen reader already walked through.

So, do accessibility overlays work?

For the question that actually matters – can a disabled person complete what they came to your site to do – the honest answer is: not reliably, and often not at all.

This isn’t one consultant’s grudge. The Overlay Fact Sheet, an open letter signed by contributors to the WCAG, ARIA, and HTML specifications, by code contributors to the JAWS and NVDA screen readers, and by internal accessibility experts at Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Shopify, lays out the technical case in detail. Automated repair of image alt text, form labels, error handling, and keyboard focus is – in their words – not reliable. Modern component-based frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue change the page out from under the overlay entirely.

And the people these tools are supposedly for? In the survey cited by the Fact Sheet, just 2.4% of users with disabilities rated overlays as “very effective.” Many find them so disruptive they install browser scripts specifically to block them. Sit with that number for a second. The product is named after accessibility, and the disabled users it targets are building tools to make it go away.

The lawsuit problem nobody mentions in the sales call

Here’s where it stops being a philosophical debate and starts costing money.

The pitch for an overlay is fundamentally a legal one: install this, avoid a lawsuit. The data says the opposite is happening – and 2025 made that clearer than ever. According to UsableNet’s research team, more than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2025, and the cases targeting sites with a widget installed didn’t let up for a single month – they ranged from roughly 95 to more than 150 filings per month, totaling around 1,400 lawsuits against businesses that already had an overlay running. EcomBack’s year-end analysis put it at nearly one in four ADA web lawsuits filed against a site with an accessibility widget live on it.

This wasn’t a fluke year. The 2024 report found the exact same pattern – roughly 25% of that year’s web accessibility lawsuits hit sites already running an overlay. Two consecutive years, same story: the widget that was sold as lawsuit protection shows up in the complaint. And the overall trend is pointing up, not down, with ADA website accessibility filings climbing 37% in the first half of 2025 alone.

What we are seeing here is a market that monetized fear faster than it solved problems. A business owner hears “you could get sued,” panics, reaches for the cheapest, fastest-looking fix, and ends up with both an inaccessible site and a false sense of security. Courts have consistently declined to treat an installed overlay as evidence of compliance. The widget isn’t a shield. In a growing number of cases, it’s a flag.

If you’ve been sued while using an accessibility widget, you are not an unlucky outlier. You are the pattern.

What changed after the FTC fine – and what didn’t

Watch the language. After the April 2025 order, accessiBe’s marketing quietly shifted from “make your website fully compliant” to softer phrasing like “align with WCAG 2.1/2.2 Level AA standards.” That hedge is the FTC compliance position – it’s what a company says when it’s legally barred from promising the thing it used to promise.

The technology didn’t change. The architecture that makes overlays fail at the source-code level is exactly the same as it was in 2024. What changed is that one regulator finally made the biggest player stop saying the quiet part out loud. The marketing got more careful. The product did not get better.

What to do if you’re running an overlay right now

The instinct is to panic and rip the widget off your site this afternoon. Resist that for about a day – just long enough to do it in the right order. Here’s the sane sequence:

1. Capture a baseline. Before you change anything, get a manual WCAG 2.2 AA audit – a human navigating your site with a keyboard and a screen reader, not a script – so you have a documented record of what’s actually broken underneath the overlay. This is the difference between an accessibility overlay and a manual audit: one hides the problems, the other documents them so they can be fixed. It also gives you evidence of good-faith effort if a demand letter is already in your inbox.
2. Remove the overlay. Once you’ve got that baseline, take the widget down. Don’t keep treating it as protection – the data is clear that it isn’t, and every day it stays up is another day of false comfort, a possible privacy liability (overlays that auto-detect assistive technology can expose a user’s disability status, creating GDPR and CCPA exposure), and one more thing a plaintiff’s attorney can point to. You don’t need a finished remediation plan to pull it; you just need the baseline.
3. Remediate at the source. Now do the real work: fix the actual HTML, ARIA, and component code your audit flagged. Those fixes are permanent, they work for every assistive technology, and they don’t depend on a script winning a race against a screen reader.

That’s the whole path. Baseline, remove the widget, fix the site for real.

The bigger picture

The reality is that accessibility was never going to have a one-line-of-code answer, because accessibility isn’t a bug to be patched – it’s a quality of how a thing is built. You can’t bolt inclusion on after the fact any more than you can bolt on trustworthiness or good design. The FTC fine didn’t reveal anything the disability community hadn’t been saying loudly since 2020. It just, for once, made it official.

The good news is that the alternative isn’t mysterious or out of reach. It’s the same thing it’s always been: test your site the way disabled people actually use it, fix what’s broken, and verify the fix. That’s not a widget. That’s just doing the work – and it’s the only thing that’s ever actually worked.

Frequently asked questions

Do accessibility overlays make my website ADA compliant?
No. The FTC fined accessiBe $1 million in 2025 specifically for claiming its automated overlay could make sites WCAG-compliant. Overlays modify your page after it loads rather than fixing the underlying code, so they cannot guarantee compliance – and courts have repeatedly declined to treat an installed overlay as proof of it.

Can I still get sued if I have an accessibility widget installed?
Yes. In 2025, businesses running overlays were sued every single month – roughly 1,400 such cases across the year, and EcomBack found nearly 25% of all U.S. web accessibility lawsuits targeted sites that already had a widget installed. It was the same story in 2024. An overlay does not prevent a lawsuit and is not a legal defense.

What’s the difference between an overlay and a manual accessibility audit?
An overlay is automated JavaScript that attempts to patch issues at page load. A manual audit is a human testing your site with assistive technology, documenting real WCAG failures, and giving your developers code-level fixes. The overlay hides problems; the audit resolves them at the source.

Should I remove accessiBe (or another overlay) from my website?
Yes – and you don’t need to wait long to do it. Get a manual WCAG 2.2 AA audit first so you have a documented baseline of what’s broken underneath it, then take the widget down promptly. You don’t need a finished remediation plan to remove it – leaving it up just preserves the false sense of protection and the privacy and legal exposure that come with it. Once it’s off, fix the issues in your actual source code.

Are overlay font-size and contrast controls useful?
Rarely. Users who need larger text or higher contrast almost always already have those controls built into their operating system or browser, and they work across every site – not just yours. The overlay’s version is, at best, redundant.

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Running an overlay and not sure what’s actually broken underneath it? Get a real audit – we’ll test your site the way your users do, and tell you the truth.

If your business sells products or services to consumers in the European Union, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) almost certainly affects you, even if your company is based outside the EU. The law has applied since 28 June 2025, so this is no longer a future deadline: it is the current rulebook.

Here is a plain-language look at what the EAA covers, who it applies to, and what to do next.

What is the European Accessibility Act?

The EAA (Directive (EU) 2019/882) sets common accessibility requirements for a wide range of everyday products and services, so that people with disabilities can use them on an equal basis. Every EU member state has written it into national law, which means the requirements, and the penalties for ignoring them, apply across the entire EU market.

Who does it apply to?

The EAA applies to businesses of any size that sell covered products or provide covered services to EU consumers, wherever the business itself is based. Covered categories include:

• E-commerce: any website or app selling to EU consumers
• Consumer banking and financial services
• Smartphones, computers, and operating systems
• E-books and e-readers
• Audiovisual media services, such as streaming platforms and their apps
• ATMs, payment terminals, ticketing machines, and other self-service terminals
• Telephone, messaging, and emergency communication services
• Consumer-facing parts of air, bus, rail, and waterborne transport: websites, apps, and e-ticketing

There is one significant carve-out: microenterprises that provide services (fewer than 10 employees and no more than €2 million in annual turnover) are exempt. The exemption only covers service providers, though. If you manufacture, import, or distribute covered products, size does not take you out of scope.

The deadlines that matter

• 28 June 2025: the EAA applies to all new products placed on the EU market and all services provided to EU consumers from this date.
• 28 June 2030: service contracts signed before June 2025 may run unchanged until they expire, but no later than this date.
• Self-service terminals deployed before June 2025 may stay in service until the end of their economically useful life, up to a maximum of 20 years.

In practice: if your website or app is in scope and not yet accessible, you are already late. The transition periods cover pre-existing contracts and hardware, not websites and apps serving customers today.

What does compliance look like?

For websites and apps, conformity is judged against EN 301 549, the European standard harmonized for the EAA, which for web content maps to WCAG 2.1 Level AA (with WCAG 2.2 the sensible target for new work). The EAA also expects documentation: accessibility information in your terms and conditions, conformity documentation for products, and processes that keep things accessible as they change. A workable plan looks like this:

1. Audit your product, website, or app against WCAG 2.1 AA and EN 301 549.
2. Fix what the audit finds, prioritizing blockers for keyboard and screen reader users.
3. Publish the required accessibility documentation.
4. Build accessibility checks into your release process so you stay compliant.

Each member state sets its own enforcement and penalties, and several allow substantial fines. Consumers and disability organizations can also file complaints directly with national authorities.

Not sure where you stand?

An accessibility audit will tell you exactly how your product or site measures up against the EAA’s requirements, and our consulting team can turn the findings into a remediation plan that fits your roadmap. If you need formal documentation for procurement, we prepareVPATs and ACRs as well.