Last week I said that an accessibility scan is a flashlight, not a pass or fail test. It shines a light on a part of your site’s accessibility. Roughly a third of accessibility issues are all any automated tool can find, and the rest needs a person looking with intention.
Hold onto that number, because today we’re talking about a product category that promises something no scanner can do. Find everything. Fix everything. Automatically. And usually for a monthly fee.
I’m not going to name any companies here. This isn’t about one vendor but about a whole category of products. If you’ve spent any time searching for how to make your site accessible, you’ve no doubt seen the ads. One line of code. Instant compliance. Protection from lawsuits.
Let’s talk about why you shouldn’t use these and what I recommend instead.
Most of these products do two separate things at once. Let me break those down.
The first is the widget (or sometimes called an overlay). It’s often a little floating icon, usually the figure of a person inside a circle (similar to the icon that’s in the middle of the logo for this Substack), that sits in the corner of a webpage. Click it and a panel opens with a bunch of toggles. Bigger text. Higher contrast. A “screen reader mode.” Magnification. Different settings for different types of users.
The second is the automatic repair layer. That’s a piece of code that loads with your page and rewrites parts of it on the fly. It bases those changes on the selections made in the widget and the accessibility issues it detects.
One line of code added to your site and you’re finished.
Except that’s not really the case.
Here’s the thing about someone who needs larger text, or higher contrast, or a screen reader. They don’t need your website to offer those things. They already have them, built into the operating system, built into the browser, or running as the assistive technology they use all day on every site they visit. Their settings travel with them, tuned exactly the way they like.
So when your website hands them a special toolbar, it’s offering something they already have, in a version they didn’t choose and can’t tune. Their own setup is fitted to them. A generic toolbar bolted onto your website isn’t.
Automatic repair can work for a narrow band of problems. It’s roughly the same narrow band a scan can find. This shouldn’t surprise anyone because it’s the same kind of code pattern matching.
What the widget can’t reliably do is anything that requires judgment. Meaningful alt text is an obvious example. A machine can look at a photo and generate a description of what’s in it. It cannot know why you put that photo on that page or how it fits into the context, which is the actual thing that alt text is for. The same goes for:
whether your form labels are accurate
whether error messages actually reach a screen reader
whether everything can be operated with a keyboard
whether the reading order makes sense
Those need someone who understands what the page is for.
There’s a timing problem too. Sites built with modern frameworks change their own content constantly, long after the page first loads. A menu opens. A cart updates. A filter runs. The repair script made its pass when the page appeared, and now the page is something else. It’s patching a moving target.
Maybe nothing I’ve said so far has convinced you to keep a widget off your site. If so, here’s what might. Look at how the people these widgets are meant to help actually feel about them.
The people these products claim to serve often block them from their browsers. Screen reader users have written up instructions for keeping these overlays from loading in their browsers. There are also browser extensions they can use to keep the widget from loading.
Think for a moment about what that means. It isn’t “I don’t find this helpful.” It’s “this makes the web worse for me, and I will take steps to make it stop.”
And this isn’t only coming from the people trying to use these things. Jason Taylor, a colleague of mine at UsableNet, the accessibility company I work for, leads the team doing analysis on digital accessibility lawsuits. Here’s how he described widgets in UsableNet’s 2026 Midyear Report on ADA digital accessibility lawsuit trends: many of them “inject overlays or control panels that interfere with screen reader navigation, creating new barriers for the very users they claim to serve.” It’s no wonder users go out of their way to block those overlays.
For someone who relies on assistive technology, an inaccessible site with a widget is often harder to use than one without.
There’s also a privacy problem I don’t think many site owners have considered. To switch on its “screen reader mode” automatically, an overlay has to detect that a screen reader is running on the visitor’s device. That detection reveals something deeply personal, which is that this person has a disability. The accessibility engineer Léonie Watson documented what that can lead to: one of these tools detected her screen reader, and combined with the ordinary fingerprint her browser leaves behind, it was nearly enough to single her out, as a disabled person, across every site running the same code. Nobody asked her permission. Disability is sensitive personal information, and quietly collecting it is the sort of thing privacy law exists to prevent.
I’m far from the only accessibility professional who feels this way about these widgets either.
Every few years, WebAIM, the nonprofit behind the free WAVE tool I recommended last week, surveys the people who do accessibility for a living. When it asked them to rate overlays, plugins, and widgets, two-thirds said they were not at all or not very effective.
Further, nearly a third of the practitioners WebAIM surveyed have a disability themselves, and that group was harder on these tools: 72 percent rated them not at all or not very effective. The closer someone is to actually depending on this type of tool, the less they think of it.
When the majority of people who do this work professionally, and the people with disabilities among them most of all, tell you the same thing, that isn’t a debate. That’s an answer.
I’m not an attorney and none of this is legal advice. But the numbers are public, so let’s look at them.
Jason’s Midyear report has legal filings on a pace to pass 6,000 this year, which would be a record (and also doesn’t include demand letters that attorneys send out). In the first five full months of 2026 alone, more than 700 of those lawsuits named businesses that had one of these widgets sitting on their site.
He puts the conclusion about as plainly as it can be put: a widget on the page is not a defense.
Then there’s the regulator. In 2025 the Federal Trade Commission ordered one of these widget vendors to pay $1 million to settle charges that it misrepresented what its product could do. The company had claimed its AI-powered widget could make any website conform to accessibility standards. The FTC said that claim simply wasn’t true, and the order also covered reviews the company had dressed up to look independent when they weren’t.
Legal safety is the single biggest reason people buy these products. The data, however, doesn’t support that.
There is no silver bullet here. The real work is unglamorous, and it’s the same work I’ve discussed here since starting this Substack in May.
Write meaningful alt text that says what an image is doing on your page.
Put accurate captions and/or transcripts on your audio and video.
Check your color contrast.
Write link text that makes sense on its own.
Write clearly.
Not one of those things promises to solve everything. But every one of them is real, every one of them is free, and once they’re part of how you create content, they stay done. Progress over perfection, as always.
And of course, each week, we’ll talk about another tactic you can use on your website, in your emails, or for social media, that continues to make your content more accessible.
Open your site and look at the bottom corners of the page. If there’s a floating accessibility icon sitting there, you have one of these, and it’s possible you didn’t knowingly put it there. Themes bundle them. Plugins bundle them. A well-meaning web person may have added one for you.
If you find one, don’t panic and don’t feel foolish. Do two things.
First, find out what it’s costing you. Check your plugin list or your billing. A lot of these carry a monthly fee you may have forgotten about.
Second, run a free scan on that same page with the widget still sitting on it. Use the WAVE tool I talked about last week. Watch what happens: the report fills up anyway. That’s the whole argument, and you can see it on your own site in about two minutes.
Then make your call. If it were my site, I’d take it off, keep the monthly fee, and spend the time making real, meaningful fixes.
Next Thursday (August 13): images of text, and why your promo graphics may be hiding your message from part of your audience. It’s the accessibility problem I’ve been most guilty of myself—before I created processes to correct that.
See you next Thursday.
— Jeff
Digital Accessibility – Content for Everyone is a free weekly post from Jeff Adams about making your digital content—your site, your podcast, your newsletter, your social media—usable by everyone who shows up to it. Built on the foundation of Content for Everyone, the book Jeff co-wrote with Michele Lucchini. Companion site: contentforeveryone.info.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.