A permanent public exhibit
The promises, next to the record.
Accessibility overlays are sold as one-line-of-code compliance. The public record — regulators, courts, and the disability community itself — says otherwise. Nothing below is our opinion; every case pairs a category-typical promise with a cited, public fact. Draw your own conclusion.
"AI makes your website fully compliant in 48 hours."
In January 2025 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission ordered the largest overlay vendor, accessiBe, to pay $1 million over claims that its automated product could make any website compliant with accessibility guidelines.
FTC press release & consent order, Jan 2025 — ftc.gov"Install the widget and you're protected from lawsuits."
Roughly 1 in 5 companies sued for digital accessibility in 2026 already had an accessibility widget or overlay installed. Overlays have also been cited inside complaints as evidence the underlying site remained broken.
UsableNet lawsuit tracker & 2026 trend report — usablenet.com"Built for the disability community."
Over 900 accessibility practitioners and disabled users — the people overlays claim to serve — signed an open letter asking site owners to remove overlays, reporting that the tools interfere with the screen readers and keyboard workflows they already use.
The Overlay Fact Sheet — overlayfactsheet.com"Our AI fixes your accessibility issues automatically."
Overlays run after your page loads, in the visitor's browser. They cannot repair missing form labels, broken focus order, or inaccessible checkout flows in your actual code — the exact failure classes most cited in litigation. Hiding a defect at runtime is not the same as fixing it.
WCAG 2.2 conformance requirements — w3.org/WAIWe could have built an overlay in a weekend.
Instead we built a scanner that finds the real defects, a fix queue where you approve real code changes, documents that prove the work happened, and a personalization widget scoped so it never touches your site's own behavior. It's slower to build and harder to sell in one line. It's also the only version that's true.