Comparisons & definitions
Accessibility overlays vs real audits: what the accessiBe FTC order changed
The question
A client asks: "Can't we just install one of those accessibility widgets and be done?" It's a fair question — overlays promise one-line-of-code compliance. Is that promise safe to rely on?
What's actually true
Two verifiable facts frame the answer:
- The best-known overlay vendor was penalized by a regulator. accessiBe is under a $1M FTC order — public record. A US federal consumer-protection agency took action over how the product's capabilities were represented. Whatever an overlay does technically, "install the widget and you're compliant" is a claim that has now drawn a regulator's penalty.
- Enforcement targets the actual site, not the widget. The European Accessibility Act has been enforceable since June 28, 2025, and in November 2025 — per contemporaneous press reporting — French organizations filed injunctions against Auchan, Carrefour, and E.Leclerc at the Tribunal judiciaire de Paris. In the US, UsableNet's year-end report counted 4,928 web accessibility suits across US federal and NY/CA state courts in 2025. What gets tested in these actions is how the site actually behaves for users — the underlying pages, as served.
The structural problem with overlays is honesty, not effort: a script injected on top of a page cannot verify that the page itself is accessible, and a compliance claim you can't verify is exactly the kind of claim regulators have started examining. The safer posture for an agency is the boring one: audit the real pages, document what you found, fix what you can, and never claim more than the evidence supports.
How to evaluate a client site yourself
If a client is currently relying on an overlay, here is a first-pass check you can run today:
- Disable the overlay (block its script) and run an automated WCAG checker like axe-core on the key templates. What you see is the site's actual accessibility state — the thing a complaint would be about.
- Check what the overlay actually changes. Re-enable it and compare. Many issues automated checkers flag — missing alt text, unlabeled forms, contrast failures — live in the markup itself.
- Look at the rest of the compliance surface while you're there: what fires before cookie consent, broken links, missing page metadata. If you're doing one honest pass, do the whole pass.
- Capture evidence. Record the page state behind each finding, with a date. If the question ever escalates, "here is what the page looked like and here is what failed" is the only answer that holds up.
Where we fit
SiteComply is a $29 one-shot audit built on exactly that posture: accessibility signals, consent posture, broken links, and SEO basics in one pass, every finding linked to the exact page state we observed. No overlay, no badge, no immunity claims — evidence you and your client can verify in one click, white-label-ready for agencies.