Are Overlays a Good Option for Web Accessibility?

Accessibility overlays are everywhere—and they’re failing silently.

As digital accessibility lawsuits climb, overlays promise an easy way out: slap on a widget, claim compliance, and move on. But the reality is murkier. These tools often add barriers instead of removing them. Worse, they give website owners a false sense of security while leaving users frustrated—and vulnerable to legal risk.

Let’s look beyond the sales pitch and break down what overlays actually do, what they don’t, and why relying on them may cost more than they save.

What are accessibility overlays, and how do they work?

In this case, “overlays” broadly refers to solutions that apply third-party code to the front end of your website to make improvements and change appearance and functionality. These solutions can also be referred to as plugins, widgets, or tools. Popular accessibility overlays include UserWay, AccessiBe, and AudioEye. These overlays typically allow users to change fonts, colors, text size, and similar aspects of the website, and they work by modifying the code on the page with JavaScript. Many of these solutions make claims that using them will make your website accessible without having to do any additional work, and some also claim to detect and proactively fix accessibility issues on websites using AI. Website owners often turn to these solutions as protection against accessibility lawsuits, especially since the number of lawsuits over digital accessibility has increased sharply over the last few years. In 2021 alone, the most prolific year for WCAG and web ADA-related lawsuits, there were a record 11,452 suits filed. The ease of filing these lawsuits makes it especially important to make sure that your digital experience meets the appropriate standards.

Do overlays make your website fully accessible?

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, are the set of standards used to determine website accessibility. WCAG standards require visual accessibility, such as sufficient contrast for text, but also include extensive technical requirements so that websites are usable with assistive technology like screen readers. Overlays are unable to fix these background technical requirements because they don’t address issues in the source code of the website.

Unfortunately, overlays can miss a lot of accessibility issues. Since they are just adding on to the existing code, they can’t fix the underlying errors. They also can’t fix inaccessible content.

Here are some examples of issues that overlays won’t help:

• Missing or incorrectly coded content headings
• Unclear or missing link text
• Missing alt text on images
• Form field errors, including missing labels, no indication for required fields, or unclear submit buttons
• Missing audio or video captions or descriptions

Since overlays are automated solutions, they lack manual testing and remediation. It is estimated that automated tools are able to detect only about 30% of WCAG errors, so no matter what, many issues will be missed unless manual testing is done, which would make the overlay redundant. Many consider overlays to be a “band-aid” solution only, while a company actively works to remediate errors across web properties.

These gaps can leave difficult barriers for users with disabilities to navigate. Because overlays are marketed as making your website accessible, website owners assume they no longer have issues, when in fact, these inefficient solutions are leaving them open to lawsuits. According to UsableNet’s 2023 Digital Accessibility Lawsuit Report, 30% of all digital accessibility lawsuits involved websites with overlays, a 60% increase for that year. UsableNet’s 2024 Year-End Report found that over 1,000 lawsuits were filed against websites using overlays. In some instances, just using the overlay could make a website an easy target for a lawsuit, as it is easy to find lists of websites using various accessibility widget solutions, and firms may use these lists to find targets.

The overlay vendors themselves are also open to lawsuits and complaints. On January 3rd, 2025, the FTC required AccessiBe to pay $1 million for deceptive claims that its AI product could make websites compliant with accessibility guidelines. According to the press release, AccessiBe “misrepresented the ability of its AI-powered web accessibility tool to make any website compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for people with disabilities.” This is likely to make websites using AccessiBe (and other overlays) even bigger targets, since this order specifically states that the overlays do NOT make websites compliant with WCAG.

Do disabled users use overlays?

Many disabled users actively block overlays because they can actually make it more difficult to navigate a website, especially when users already have preferred assistive technology. Overlays can fail to adapt to a user’s specific assistive technology, such as screen readers. Users relying on assistive technology already have their devices and browsers configured to their desired settings. In some cases, overlays override these settings and force them to use the overlay. A 2021 WebAIM survey found that 67% of users rated “overlays, plugins, and widgets for accessibility” as not effective, and the percentage increased to 72% in users with disabilities.

What other impacts can overlays have on your website?

Overlays can impact the overall performance of your website. Since overlays and plugins are using additional scripts hosted on third-party servers, they can be slow to load, and you have no control over it. If an overlay is resource-intensive and slows your website speed, it will degrade the experience for all users, who are very unforgiving of slow websites. Not only that, but Google uses website speed as a ranking factor, so overlays could cause fewer visitors overall.

Accessibility overlays can also impact a website’s security. Allowing third-party vendors to inject code into your website carries inherent security risks. In addition, some vendors may set cookies to allow preferences to “follow” a user to different websites, or use other tracking capabilities to collect browsing data. According to Overlay Fact Sheet,

“Overlays that automatically enable certain settings, like those for screen reader or speech recognition users, do so by detecting when an assistive technology is running on the device. This exposes the fact that the person using the device at the time has a disability. In certain cases, like screen reader users where the majority are blind or have low vision, it exposes even more detail about the nature of their disability. Like age, ethnic background, or preferred gender, disability is sensitive personal information. It is not data that should be collected without the informed consent of the person it belongs to.”

Overlay Fact Sheet also found that typically, users did not opt-in and are unable to opt-out of being tracked, which creates risk for the website owner to be found in violation of GDPR and CCPA.

So, how do you actually make your website accessible?

The most efficient, effective way is to build accessibility in from the start. But even if a rebuild isn’t on the table, you’re not stuck. Remediation is possible—and necessary.

Our accessibility and UX experts at Designsensory can run a full manual audit to uncover the issues overlays miss, then guide your team with practical, maintainable solutions. We don’t just scan and report—we train, test, and implement to ensure real compliance, not performative fixes.

Want to start today? Tools like WAVE by WebAIM and axe DevTools by Deque Systems can help you spot obvious issues in-browser, privately and securely. But remember: automated checks only go so far. Real accessibility requires human eyes and hands.

We’ve helped make everything from small tourism sites to enterprise health systems fully WCAG-compliant—and we can help you do the same.

If you’re ready to move beyond checkbox compliance and build something that actually works for everyone, get in touch. We’ll help you get it right.