Accessibility overlays do not change the code a letter points to.

What an overlay is

An overlay is third-party JavaScript. You paste one line into your theme, and when a page loads in a shopper’s browser the script runs. Most overlays do two things. They add a floating button that opens a panel of settings: bigger text, more contrast, a different font. And they try to repair the page as it loads, adding names to unnamed buttons and descriptions to images.

The panel is the part shoppers see. The repair is the part that is sold.

Why the panel does not help much. A person who needs bigger text or a screen reader already has those settings, in their operating system or in software they bought, and they use them on every site. A panel that only works on your store is one more thing to find.

What the FTC ordered accessiBe to stop saying

On January 3, 2025 the Federal Trade Commission made public a complaint and a proposed order against accessiBe, which sells an overlay called accessWidget. The FTC alleged that the company’s claims about the product were false, misleading, or unsupported: that accessWidget did not make all customer websites meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, as the marketing said it would. The complaint also alleged that the company presented third-party articles and reviews as independent opinions without disclosing its connections to the people who wrote them.

On April 22, 2025 the Commission voted 3–0 to approve the order as final. It requires a $1 million payment, which the FTC said may be used for refunds. It bars the company from representing that its automated products can make any website meet WCAG, or keep meeting it over time, unless it has evidence for the claim. It also bars presenting reviews as the independent opinions of impartial users when they are not.

That is a marketing order. It does not say what the software does or does not do on your store. It says what the company may no longer promise about it.

Our adviceIf a vendor promises that a script will make your store meet WCAG, ask them to put the promise in the contract with a date and a named page. The FTC order is the reason most of them now will not.

What the businesses that bought one are saying in court

A New York medical practice and a music retailer are suing accessiBe in federal court. The case is Sherwin K. Parikh, MD, P.C., d/b/a Tribeca Skin Center, and Dillon Music v. Accessibe, Inc., number 1:24-cv-04848, in the Southern District of New York. The first complaint was filed on June 26, 2024.

In an opinion dated June 9, 2025, the judge summed up the premise of the case in one line: that accessiBe markets a subscription product as an effective, quick, and cost-effective way to guarantee that a website fully complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and did not provide the services it had promised. The businesses brought six claims, including breach of contract, breach of implied warranty, and negligent misrepresentation. That order let them file an amended complaint, which adds a third business and points at the FTC filing, and it denied the company’s motion to dismiss as moot.

These are allegations. No court has decided whether they are true. When we read the docket on September 7, 2026, it showed no final judgment.

Why we name this case and not others. Everything above is on the public docket with a date. We do not repeat things about companies that we cannot open and read.

Stores running an overlay still get sued

UsableNet tracks web accessibility lawsuits filed in federal courts and in the state courts where most of these cases land. Its 2025 midyear report, with data through June 2025, counted 2,019 lawsuits filed in the first six months of the year.

The same report counts the cases filed against companies that already had a widget on their site: 85 in January, 119 in February, 132 in March, 105 in April, 119 in May, 99 in June. That is 659 in six months. The report’s own reading of the number is that these tools often do not fix the problems in the code that plaintiffs and law firms name, and that the panels they add can interrupt screen reader navigation.

Nobody counts demand letters, because they are private. Lawsuits are the visible part, and they are the part you can count.

What the people who test stores for a living say

WebAIM runs a survey of web accessibility practitioners. In the third survey, published in 2021, 67 percent of respondents rated overlay tools not at all or not very effective. Among respondents who have a disability the figure was 72 percent, and 2.4 percent rated them very effective.

There is also a public document called the Overlay Fact Sheet, at overlayfactsheet.com, signed by accessibility specialists, contributors to the WCAG and ARIA specifications, people who work on JAWS and NVDA, and screen reader users. Its conclusion is that no overlay product on the market can make a website fully meet an accessibility standard, and its signatories say they will always argue for fixing the problem in the site’s own code instead.

What accessiBe says

The company publishes its own account of a case that went the other way. In a post last updated March 4, 2025, accessiBe describes Erkan v. David A. Hidalgo, MD, P.C., in the Eastern District of New York, where a defendant showed the court the changes made to the site, including accessWidget, and the case was dismissed. The company quotes the court as finding those measures, and the site’s use of an accessibility widget, enough to assure it that the issues would not recur.

Read it. One dismissal, in one case, where a store made changes and also had the script installed. It is a fair thing for the company to publish, and it is not the same as the product doing the work.

Why a script cannot do the part that matters

Read a demand letter and it names a short list: product images with no description, links and buttons a screen reader cannot name, form fields with no label, text that fails contrast, keyboard focus you cannot see or escape. A script that runs in the shopper’s browser hits a wall on almost every one of them.

• It does not know what your photo shows. Alt text for a ring has to say the metal, the stone, the setting. That is your product data, not a guess from pixels.
• It does not know what your button does. A swatch named “gold” by a script is not the same as a swatch that says “gold, 14 karat, in stock”.
• It cannot fix contrast without changing your design. Repainting text to pass a measurement changes how the store looks, so most of that work is left to the panel, which the shopper has to find and switch on.
• It runs after your page does. Modern themes and apps redraw parts of the page as the shopper moves. Anything redrawn after the script ran is unpatched.
• It cannot touch checkout on most plans. That code is Shopify’s.

And the fixes are not large. Names for links and buttons live in a handful of theme templates. Labels are one line per field. Alt text is written once and uploaded in bulk. On the store in our first case study, one line in the product-card template took 490 unnamed links to zero.

Our adviceIf a store already has an overlay, do not rip it out on a Friday and tell nobody. Turn it off on a staging copy first, run the check on both, and see what the script was actually holding up. Sometimes it is the only thing naming your cart button, and you want that named in the theme before it goes.

What to do tonight

Paste your store address into the free Storefront Check. It opens your home page, one collection page, and one product page in a real browser, and comes back in about twenty seconds with thirteen counted checks: how many images, how many buttons, how many links, and how many of each failed. It is free, it takes a minute, and the result is a list you can hand to a developer.

Then do the two-minute version yourself. On your best-selling product page, press Tab and see whether you can reach add-to-cart and get back out. Turn on VoiceOver or TalkBack on your phone and swipe through a collection page, listening for the word “link” with nothing after it. Those two tests find what a script was hiding.

What we do instead. We fix the theme. We never install an overlay, on any store, for any reason. Then a person tests it again with a keyboard and a screen reader, and you get a dated report of what changed.

Sources

• FTC, January 3, 2025. “FTC Order Requires Online Marketer to Pay $1 Million for Deceptive Claims that its AI Product Could Make Websites Compliant with Accessibility Guidelines.” ftc.gov
• FTC, April 22, 2025. “FTC Approves Final Order Requiring accessiBe to pay $1 Million.” ftc.gov
• Opinion and Order, June 9, 2025. Sherwin K. Parikh, MD, P.C. v. Accessibe, Inc., 1:24-cv-04848 (S.D.N.Y.), document 55. courtlistener.com, and the docket.
• UsableNet, June 2025. 2025 Midyear Digital Accessibility Lawsuit Report. usablenet.com
• WebAIM, 2021. Survey of Web Accessibility Practitioners #3 Results. webaim.org
• Overlay Fact Sheet. overlayfactsheet.com
• accessiBe, last updated March 4, 2025. “A court’s landmark ruling affirmed accessWidget’s role in advancing accessibility.” accessibe.com

We opened every one of these. Where a fact is a claim in a filing, we say so.