Accessibility overlay widgets do not make your website compliant. Here is what does.

An accessibility overlay is a small script you add to your site that produces a floating button and a toolbar: bigger text, different colours, a “screen reader” mode. They are sold as instant ADA compliance for a monthly fee, and they do not deliver it. They do not fix the underlying code, screen-reader users widely report that they interfere with the tools they already use, and businesses running overlays have still been sued. If you are paying for one, this article is about what to do with that money instead.

Why an overlay cannot fix a site

Accessibility problems live in the page itself. An image with no text alternative has no alternative whether or not a toolbar is floating over it. A form field with no label is unlabelled for a screen reader regardless of the widget’s “reading mode”. A button that cannot be reached with the Tab key is unreachable. The overlay sits on top of these problems and offers cosmetic options that a visitor with a disability has almost always already configured in their own browser or operating system, often better.

Worse, the overlay’s own toolbar becomes one more thing the visitor has to fight through, and its attempts to “guess” alt text or restructure headings can actively mislead.

Why it does not protect you either

Plaintiffs’ firms know what overlays are. The scanners they run see through them, because the scanner tests the code, not the toolbar. Numerous businesses with an overlay installed have received demand letters and been sued regardless. Some attorneys treat a visible overlay as evidence the owner knew accessibility was an issue and chose a shortcut. It is, at best, neutral to your position, and you are paying monthly for it.

What real accessibility work is

It is unglamorous and mostly bounded. Against WCAG 2.1 AA, on a typical small-business site, it means: enough contrast between text and background; a meaningful text alternative on every image that carries information and an empty one on every image that is decoration; a label on every form field and an error message that says what went wrong; everything operable with a keyboard alone, in a sensible order, with a visible focus indicator; a heading structure that reflects the actual structure of the page; captions on video; no content that only appears on hover; and nothing that flashes. Most of this is fixing HTML and CSS that was written without care, and most of it also makes the site better for everyone and easier for Google to read.

How to check your own site in ten minutes

Unplug your mouse and try to use your site with the Tab, Enter and arrow keys only. Can you reach every link and button? Can you see where you are? Can you fill in and send the contact form? Then turn on your phone’s screen reader (VoiceOver on iPhone, TalkBack on Android) and listen to your homepage. If it reads “image, image, image, button, button”, you have found the problems an overlay was hiding.

What to do with the overlay budget

Cancel it and put the money into fixing the site once. Our accessibility audit is $450, and audit plus remediation with a published accessibility statement is from $1,200 — a one-time cost roughly equal to a year or two of an overlay subscription, and at the end of it the site is actually accessible. Ongoing monitoring, so new content does not undo the work, is $49 a month on any care plan.