Why Accessibility Overlays Don't Deliver on Their Promises (And What the FTC Just Made Official)

First article in a two-part series. The second covers morphic adaptation as a structural alternative.

On April 22, 2025, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission unanimously approved a consent order that fined accessiBe — one of the world's largest sellers of accessibility overlays — one million dollars. The amount is trivial relative to the company's 2024 revenue (roughly $51.3 million by public estimates), but the legal precedent is anything but.

For the first time, a U.S. federal authority has put in writing what accessibility developers, assistive technology users, and the disability community have been saying since 2019: a JavaScript overlay injected into a page does not make a site WCAG-compliant. It claims to. That's not the same thing.

This article covers two things: what exactly an accessibility overlay is, and what the FTC specifically charged accessiBe with. The second article in this series covers morphic adaptation — the structurally different approach we're building with morphic-engine.

What Is an Accessibility Overlay?

An accessibility overlay is a third-party script that a website owner adds to their pages, typically via a single line of code. Once loaded, the script scans the DOM, injects a floating widget — often a little person icon — and offers the user options to tweak aspects of their experience: text size, contrast, screen reading, link highlighting, and so on.

The sales pitch is powerful. It boils down to three promises:

1. One line of code to paste, no changes to the original site.
2. "Automatic" WCAG 2.1 AA compliance, guaranteed by AI.
3. Legal protection against ADA lawsuits in the U.S.

The market these promises target is enormous. In the U.S., the Americans with Disabilities Act exposes public website owners to civil lawsuits if their platform isn't accessible. The number of digital ADA complaints filed exploded after 2017, going from a few hundred a year to over four thousand by 2022. For an e-commerce merchant or a public service operator, the idea of a "legal shield" at $49 a month is very attractive.

The problem is, none of the three promises are true.

The Marketing Promise vs. Technical Reality

An accessible website isn't one that offers adaptation tools. It's one whose HTML structure, ARIA attributes, contrasts, alt text, visible focus states, keyboard navigation, reading order, and semantic code enable the assistive technologies already used by people with disabilities — screen readers like NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, magnifiers like ZoomText, voice browsers — to deliver a coherent experience. WCAG lays out these requirements across four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, robust.

A JavaScript overlay technically cannot rewrite these foundations. It lives on top of a DOM it didn't author. At best, it can mask some surface-level issues — bump up visual contrast, enlarge text — at the cost of side effects that create new ones.

The most comprehensive technical analysis to date is the Overlay Fact Sheet, signed by over 700 accessibility specialists (researchers, developers, assistive technology users), which documents six categories of recurring problems:

• The overlay duplicates or contradicts announcements made by the screen reader already active on the user's machine, producing unintelligible double-speak.
• The overlay changes the tab order at runtime, breaking the mental map the keyboard user has built.
• The overlay injects haphazard ARIA attributes that invalidate the original semantic contract (e.g., role="button" slapped on a <div> with no tabindex or Enter key handler).
• The overlay triggers animations or CSS transforms that ignore prefers-reduced-motion, causing nausea and migraine attacks in vestibular users.
• The overlay aggressively captures keyboard input, preventing the user from accessing their own system shortcuts.
• The overlay sends usage data to its servers, which in several European jurisdictions raises unresolved GDPR issues.

The documented result is paradoxical: for many users with disabilities, a site equipped with an overlay is less accessible than a standard site. A dedicated browser extension, Should I Use An Overlay, even emerged specifically to block overlays detected on visited pages.

The FTC vs. accessiBe Case: What Was Established

On January 3, 2025, the Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint against accessiBe Inc. and simultaneously published a proposed consent order. The public comment period opened on January 6 and ran until February 5, 2025. On April 22, 2025, after reviewing the comments received, the Commission unanimously approved the final consent order.

Two sets of violations are charged against accessiBe.

The first concerns the promise of WCAG compliance. The FTC found that accessiBe "misrepresented the ability of its AI-powered web accessibility tool to make any website compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)" — in other words, the claim "our AI makes your site WCAG-compliant" had no verifiable scientific basis. The order now prohibits accessiBe from making any explicit or implied claim that its automated products make a site WCAG-compliant or can maintain that compliance over time, unless they provide contemporaneous evidence for each claim.

The second concerns accessiBe's marketing strategy. The FTC found that the company "deceptively formatted third-party articles and reviews to appear as if they were independent opinions" and "failed to disclose material connections to online reviewers." In plain terms, articles, testimonials, and reviews published online and presented as coming from independent experts were actually funded by accessiBe without disclosing that link. The consent order now requires "clear and conspicuous" disclosure of any material connection between the company and an endorsement.

The one-million-dollar fine represents, as accessibility expert Adrian Roselli noted, about two percent of accessiBe's 2024 revenue. The legal precedent, however, is priceless: it is now established under U.S. law that an overlay cannot be marketed as a WCAG compliance solution without contemporaneous evidence to back it up.

The Context: Over 800 Client Companies Sued

The FTC consent order alone won't resolve the situation for overlay customers. According to a tally kept by TestParty, over 800 sites equipped with AccessiBe or competing overlays faced ADA lawsuits in 2023 and 2024. The overlay, meant to shield against these lawsuits, prevented neither their filing, their admissibility, nor their costly resolution.

The gap between marketing promise and legal reality is therefore documented on two levels: technically by the accessibility community since 2019, legally by the FTC since 2025.

The Question That Remains Open

If the overlay isn't the answer, what is?

Manual WCAG audit by an expert, followed by structural remediation of HTML and CSS, remains the only established path to real compliance. It's more demanding, slower, and harder to sell than a one-line script to paste. But it's also the only path that produces sites that users with disabilities can actually use.

Beyond WCAG compliance, another direction has been emerging in recent years: morphic adaptation. Rather than patching downstream what wasn't designed upstream, it proposes thinking of the interface, from the outset, as a set of morphological parameters that each user configures once and the platform honors end-to-end. That's the subject of the second article in this series.

Sources

• FTC Order Requires Online Marketer to Pay $1 Million for Deceptive Claims that its AI Product Could Make Websites Compliant with Accessibility Guidelines — Federal Trade Commission, January 3, 2025.
• accessiBe Inc. — Case 2223156 — Official FTC docket.
• A million-dollar blunder: How the FTC's settlement with software provider accessiBe can help your business avoid similar missteps — FTC Business Guidance Blog, April 2025.
• Beware of AI Accessibility Promises: US Federal Agency Fines an Overlay Company One Million Dollars — Law Office of Lainey Feingold.
• FTC Catches up to #accessiBe — Adrian Roselli, technical analysis.
• Overlay Fact Sheet — Over 700 signatories from the accessibility community.
• Why 800+ Businesses with AccessiBe Were Still Sued — TestParty.

Read next: "Morphic Adaptation: Designing Instead of Patching" — second article in this series, presenting a structural alternative to overlays and the open-source project morphic-engine.