An accessibility overlay is a script that adds a toolbar to a website and adjusts how the page is presented: bigger text, different contrast, a reading guide, sometimes machine-written alt text. It does not change the HTML the site serves, the PDFs it links to, or the video it embeds. The ADA Title II rule measures conformance of that content with WCAG 2.1 AA, so an overlay cannot get a public entity to compliance, and the FTC has fined one vendor for saying otherwise.
What an overlay does
Install the plugin or paste the script, and a floating icon appears in the corner of every page. Click it and a panel opens with toggles: larger text, high contrast, a dyslexia font, bigger cursor, stop animations, highlight links, a reading mask. Some products go further and run an automated pass on the page as it loads, attaching machine-generated alt text to images, guessing at form labels, and adding ARIA attributes to elements the script decides are buttons or menus.
Everything it does happens in the visitor's browser after the page arrives. The page the server sends is unchanged. If the theme's body text is grey on white at 3:1, it is still grey on white at 3:1 in the source; the overlay offers a button that a visitor might press to change it. If a form's fields have no labels, the widget may inject a guess at runtime, or may not.
Vendors sell this on a subscription per site, with a dashboard and a compliance badge to put in the footer. For a city clerk under a deadline it looks like the fastest way through. It is not, and it is worth understanding why in enough detail to explain it to the board.
What the ADA Title II rule measures
The rule requires that "web content" a public entity provides or makes available conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Conformance under WCAG is a property of the content: the HTML, the images and their text alternatives, the documents, the media. WCAG's own conformance requirements say a page conforms if it meets every applicable success criterion, and the test is applied to the page as delivered.
An overlay does not change what is delivered. A screen reader user who arrives at the site is running their own assistive technology already, configured the way they need it. They are not going to find the widget's icon, open its panel, and turn on a screen-reader mode that reinterprets the page. They are going to read the page as it is, and the page as it is still has the empty buttons, the unlabeled fields and the hover-only menu.
That is why every accessibility audit, and every plaintiff's expert, tests the source. The ADA Title II overview covers what the rule reaches; our post on where government WordPress sites fail lists the failures a scanner finds. None of those failures is resolved by a toolbar.
The FTC and accessiBe
In January 2025 the Federal Trade Commission announced a proposed order requiring accessiBe, the largest overlay vendor, to pay $1 million and to stop claiming that its accessWidget could make any website compliant with WCAG. The complaint said the claims were false, misleading or unsubstantiated, and separately that the company had formatted paid reviews and articles to look like independent opinions. The Commission approved the final order in April 2025.
The order is narrow in the sense that it binds one company. It matters more broadly because a federal agency put in writing what accessibility practitioners had been saying for years: an automated product cannot make an arbitrary website WCAG compliant, and a vendor that says it can is making a claim it cannot support. A public entity that relies on that claim in front of DOJ or a court is relying on a claim the FTC has already rejected.
The Overlay Fact Sheet, a public statement maintained at overlayfactsheet.com, has been signed by hundreds of accessibility professionals, including many who are themselves disabled, asking website owners not to deploy overlays and explaining the harms. It is short and worth reading before a purchasing decision.
What overlays get wrong for the people using them
The strongest argument against overlays comes from the disabled visitors they are sold to serve.
A blind visitor already runs a screen reader. An overlay's injected ARIA and its screen-reader mode fight with it: duplicate announcements, changed keyboard behavior, focus pulled to the widget. Several widely used overlays have been documented trapping keyboard focus in their own panel.
A low-vision visitor already has the operating system set to large text and high contrast, and the browser zoomed. A widget that sets its own font size ignores those settings and sometimes breaks the layout the visitor had working.
Machine-generated alt text is a guess. "A group of people standing outside" is not a description of the council members at the ribbon cutting, and "image" is not a description of the road closure map. WCAG asks for text that serves the same purpose as the image, which a script cannot know.
Some overlays also fingerprint visitors to remember their settings, which raises its own privacy questions on a government site, and adds a third-party script to every page that the entity does not control. On a site that already runs a consent banner and a security policy, that is an odd thing to add on purpose.
Lawsuits kept coming with overlays installed
Overlays are sold with the implication that they reduce legal risk. The lawsuit tracking that UsableNet publishes each year has found hundreds of web accessibility suits filed against sites that had an overlay installed at the time, and the number has not dropped as overlay adoption grew. The reason is mechanical: a plaintiff's expert tests the delivered page with a screen reader and a keyboard, finds the failures in the source, and the widget is not a defence.
For a public entity under Title II the exposure is different from a private business under Title III, but the test is the same. After the compliance date the question is whether the content conforms to WCAG 2.1 AA. A badge in the footer does not answer it.
Where a widget is fine
Nothing above means a user-preference panel is forbidden. A site that already conforms can offer a text-size control or a motion toggle as a courtesy, the way some news sites do. WCAG 2.1 AA itself asks that text resize to 200 percent and that motion can be paused, and a visible control for that is a reasonable way to meet it. The distinction is between a control on top of accessible content and a product sold as a substitute for it.
If a site already has an overlay, the review will say what it is covering up. Removing it is usually a one-line change, and the fixes it was standing in for are the same fixes the site needed all along.
What to do instead, and what it costs
The work an overlay pretends to do is a developer's project, and on a WordPress site it is smaller than the sales pitch implies. Contrast, focus styles, menu keyboard access and heading structure are set once in the theme. Forms get labels and announced errors from a form plugin that supports them. Images get alt text, flyers become pages, video gets corrected captions, and documents get produced accessibly from the source, which our post on fixing the PDFs first walks through.
| Overlay subscription | Fixing the site | |
|---|---|---|
| Changes the content the rule measures | No | Yes |
| Works with the visitor's own screen reader | Often conflicts | Yes |
| Covers PDFs and video | No | Yes, with a document process and a caption workflow |
| Ongoing cost | Per site, per month, forever | Maintenance plan that also covers hosting, updates and security |
| Holds up in an audit or a complaint | No | Yes, if maintained |
On the ongoing cost row, the argument is the maintenance plan. A fixed site drifts. A theme update resets a colour, a new plugin adds an unlabeled button, a staff member uploads a flyer. A plan where updates are tested on staging before they go live, and where the developer who did the accessibility work is the one maintaining the site, is how the fix stays fixed. Our plugin update testing workflow describes what that looks like day to day.
Where TopSyde fits
TopSyde reviews public-entity WordPress sites against WCAG 2.1 AA for free. A senior developer scans every page, works the pages residents use with a keyboard and a screen reader, and sends a written list ranked by what to fix first, including anything an installed overlay is masking. Fixes are quoted from that list at our published development rate. Afterwards, hosting and maintenance is $89/mo per site, month to month, with tested updates so the work holds.
The request form is on the ADA compliance page. If your entity has already bought an overlay, send the site anyway; the review costs nothing and will tell you what you are paying for.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the DOJ rule ban accessibility overlays?
No. The rule does not name any product or technique. It requires web content to conform to WCAG 2.1 AA, and an overlay does not change the content, so it does not help meet the requirement. A public entity is free to run one; it just cannot count on it.
Our overlay vendor says their product makes us WCAG 2.1 AA compliant. Is that true?
Ask them to put it in writing and to state which success criteria the product satisfies on your site, then test a page with a screen reader. In 2025 the FTC ordered accessiBe to stop making that exact claim and to pay $1 million, because the claim could not be supported. No vendor's badge substitutes for testing the delivered page.
Is a WordPress accessibility plugin the same thing as an overlay?
No. Plugins like WP Accessibility or Equalize Digital's Accessibility Checker fix or flag problems in the site's own code: adding skip links, correcting focus styles, finding images without alt text in the editor. They change what the server sends, or tell the editor what to change. An overlay adds a script that alters presentation in the visitor's browser and leaves the source as it was.
What should we do first if we already have an overlay installed?
Get the site reviewed against WCAG 2.1 AA with the overlay present, so the findings show what it is masking. Fix the theme, forms and documents. Then remove the overlay, and if the board wants a text-size or motion control as a courtesy, add a small one that does not inject ARIA or intercept the keyboard.
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DevOps & Security Lead
12+ years DevOps, Linux & cloud infrastructure certified
Marcus leads infrastructure and security at TopSyde, managing the server fleet and AI monitoring systems that keep client sites fast and protected. Former sysadmin turned WordPress hosting specialist.
