Short answer: not the way they're sold. Let's look at the evidence rather than the marketing.
What an overlay actually does
An accessibility overlay is a snippet of JavaScript you add to your site. It loads a floating toolbar and tries to "fix" accessibility in the visitor's browser — without changing your underlying website. Remove the script, and your site reverts to exactly what it was. Nothing was actually repaired in the code.
That single fact explains most of what follows.
The coverage ceiling: 30–40%
Every credible study of automated accessibility tooling lands in the same range: automation can detect roughly 30–40% of WCAG issues. The remaining 60–70% — meaningful labels, logical focus order, keyboard traps, error handling, content that makes sense to a screen reader — require a human testing with real assistive technology. An overlay is automation. It cannot see most of the barriers on your site, let alone fix them.
The lawsuit data (this is the part that matters)
If overlays worked as advertised, sites running them wouldn't get sued. They do — at scale:
- In the first half of 2025, 456 website-accessibility lawsuits targeted sites that had an accessibility widget installed — about 22.6% of all such filings.
- Across 2023–2024, 800+ businesses using overlays (accessiBe, UserWay, EqualWeb and others) were sued — more than a quarter of all digital-accessibility lawsuits in that window.
Having the widget didn't prevent the lawsuit. Plaintiff-side firms recognize the scripts on sight and treat them as a signal — a flag that a business assumed a plug-in handled the problem.
Courts don't accept overlays as a defense
This isn't theoretical. Settlements in accessibility cases routinely require the business to remove the overlay and perform genuine remediation. The overlay buys nothing in court.
Regulators agree: the FTC's $1M action
In 2025, the Federal Trade Commission fined accessiBe $1,000,000 for making false, misleading, or unsubstantiated claims that its widget could make sites compliant. When the largest vendor in the category pays seven figures over its core promise, the category's promise is the problem. Full breakdown for Ontario businesses here.
They can also make things worse
Overlays frequently interfere with the screen readers and keyboard navigation that disabled people already use — hijacking focus, duplicating announcements, or fighting the user's own assistive tech. So beyond the legal exposure, they can degrade the experience for the very people the law protects.
What actually works instead
Real, defensible accessibility is unglamorous and effective:
- Manual + automated testing against WCAG 2.2 AA.
- Source-code remediation — the fix lives in your HTML/components/content and works whether or not any script runs.
- Documentation — an audit and remediation plan that supports a good-faith position if a complaint ever lands.
See the side-by-side: overlay vs remediation.
Check what your widget is (and isn't) covering — free
The PassProof Report detects whether you're running an overlay and shows, in ~30 seconds, the failures it isn't catching — plus a fixed-price path to fix them for real.
👉 Get your free PassProof Report
PassProof is a remote-first accessibility-engineering studio serving Ontario. Accessibility-engineering guidance, not legal advice.