Unkillable Access / Why accessibility overlays attract lawsuits

Why accessibility overlays attract lawsuits

Over 800 businesses using overlay widgets were sued in 2023–24 — more than a quarter of all digital accessibility lawsuits. Here is what the record shows.

The intuition is that adding an accessibility widget should reduce legal risk. The data points the other way.

What the record shows

• More than 800 businesses using overlay widgets were sued in 2023–24 — over 25% of all digital accessibility lawsuits in that window.
• Sites with an overlay were sued at rates equal to or exceeding sites with no accessibility solution at all.
• The FTC fined accessiBe $1,000,000 in April 2025 for misrepresenting its product's ability to make sites WCAG-compliant, and for undisclosed paid endorsements.
• The National Federation of the Blind returned the company's convention sponsorship and passed a resolution over its practices and its product's efficacy.

Why it happens

An overlay operates on the rendered page in the visitor's browser. It can guess at what a control does, but it cannot know what a photograph shows, whether a form's error messages make sense, or whether a checkout can be completed with a screen reader. Meanwhile the marketing frequently implies the problem is solved — which creates a documented gap between what a business believes it bought and what its users experience.

There is also evidence that some screen-reader users disable overlays outright, because the widget interferes with the assistive technology they already have configured.

What to do instead

Fix the markup. Defects in your own HTML, corrected in your own HTML, do not depend on a third party's script being loaded, funded, or correct. Start by finding out what is actually broken:

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