Accessibility Overlays (Criticism of Overlay Widgets)
Accessibility overlays are JavaScript widgets added on top of an existing website that claim to make it accessible automatically, for example through font-size sliders, contrast switches or AI-based corrections. Specialists criticise them sharply: the Overlay Fact Sheet, signed by more than 1,000 accessibility experts, states that overlays do not fix the underlying code problems and cannot produce genuine WCAG conformance.
In practice
How serious the problem is became clear in January 2025, when the US Federal Trade Commission settled with the overlay vendor accessiBe: the company had to pay one million dollars, partly because it had advertised that its widget made websites 30% WCAG conformant instantly and that AI would fix the remaining 70% within 48 hours — and because accessiBe had disguised paid advertising as independent editorial coverage. For site owners in Austria the position is clear: neither the Accessibility Act (BaFG) nor the European Accessibility Act accepts an overlay script as evidence of genuine accessibility; the problems have to be fixed in the source code itself.