An accessibility overlay is a script added to a website that offers a toolbar of adjustments (text size, contrast, cursor) and attempts to repair accessibility problems in the browser after the page loads. The vendors’ pitch has been that one line of code makes a site compliant. Since the start of 2025 a US regulator, a French court and the lawsuit statistics have each said something about that pitch. This post collects what they said and what it means if you are facing the European Accessibility Act.
The Federal Trade Commission
In January 2025 the FTC filed a complaint against accessiBe, one of the largest overlay vendors, alleging that its claims that its product could make any website compliant with WCAG were false, misleading or unsubstantiated, and that third-party articles and reviews had been formatted to look independent when they were not. In April 2025 the Commission approved the final consent order by a unanimous vote. It requires a payment of 1 million dollars and bars the company from claiming that its automated technology can guarantee or maintain WCAG compliance without competent and reliable scientific evidence. The consent package is on the FTC’s site.
The order is about marketing claims, not about whether overlays are ever useful. But it establishes, from a regulator, that “automatically WCAG compliant” is a claim that needs scientific evidence nobody has produced.
The lawsuit data
UsableNet’s 2026 midyear report notes that lawsuits against companies already using accessibility widgets continue. A toolbar does not make a site usable for a screen reader user who cannot complete checkout, and it does not stop a plaintiff’s firm filing. See our summary of the midyear numbers.
The Caen court
On 4 June 2026 the Caen court ordered Carrefour France to make its website and mobile app fully accessible within six months, with a daily penalty for delay. The site had been assessed as 71 per cent accessible. The judge’s view was that an e-commerce site cannot be a little accessible. It has to be fully accessible. No overlay was at issue in the case, but the reasoning matters here: the EAA sets functional requirements that a service meets or does not. A tool that improves a score without achieving conformance does not change the legal position. Details are in our post on EAA enforcement.
Why the technology cannot get there
Overlays run after the browser has parsed the page. From that position they can change presentation and guess at some fixes, but they face limits that are structural rather than a matter of engineering effort:
- Intent. An alt text describes why an image is there. A script can describe what is in it, which is a different thing, and for icons, charts and product photos often the wrong thing.
- Semantics. A div with a click handler has no role, no name and no keyboard behaviour. Inferring which divs are buttons, what they are called and what state they are in is guesswork at scale.
- Order and focus. Reading order, focus order and focus visibility are properties of the source and the stylesheet. Patching them from outside tends to break as the page updates.
- Timing. Content added after the script runs is missed unless the script keeps re-scanning, which has its own costs.
- Everything that is not a web page. PDFs, native apps and documents are out of reach, and EN 301 549 has clauses for all of them.
- Users’ own tools. People who rely on assistive technology already have magnification, contrast and reading settings. A second layer of controls can conflict with them.
What the EAA actually asks for
The EAA requires in-scope services to meet the functional requirements in Annex I and requires providers to publish information explaining how the service meets them (Annex V). The harmonised standard, EN 301 549 V4.1.1, maps its clauses to those requirements in a new Annex ZB. Conformity is demonstrated clause by clause against the product itself, and an overlay produces no evidence at that level. Where automation genuinely helps is detection: automated engines such as axe-core find the common failures quickly and repeatably, monitoring catches regressions, and AI-drafted alt text reviewed by a person speeds up remediation. The fixes still go in the code.
Try it this week
If your site runs an overlay, audit a key page with Accessibility Checker with the overlay enabled and again with it disabled, and compare the findings. Then read An EAA compliance workflow and Testing and conformance, which describe what evidence a regulator can use.