Accessibility overlay alternatives: four approaches compared

People usually arrive here for one of four reasons. A practitioner, client or user has told them an overlay does not fix the underlying problems. They have read about the FTC's 2025 order against an overlay vendor (see below). They have received a demand letter despite having a widget installed. Or they simply want to know what is actually wrong with their site, and an overlay does not tell them.

The underlying point is the same in each case. WCAG describes properties of the content and code a site delivers: images with text alternatives, form fields with labels, sufficient contrast, controls a keyboard can reach. An overlay tries to patch some of these in the browser after the page loads. The alternatives below find the problems so they can be fixed at the source, where the fix reaches every visitor and every assistive technology. Our own position is set out in full on why we don't sell an overlay.

Free checkers are the fastest way to see what is wrong with a page. WAVE draws icons for errors and alerts onto the page itself. Lighthouse runs inside Chrome. The axe DevTools extension sits in developer tools, and Accessibility Insights for Web adds guided manual tests.

Strengths: they cost nothing, need little or no setup, and show problems at the exact element. Browser extensions such as WAVE's evaluate the page you are viewing, so they can check pages you are signed in to.

Limits: most check one page per run, so problems on pages you did not check stay hidden. They report problems but do not fix them. And like every automated tool, they catch only part of WCAG.

Best for: a first look, learning, and checking one page while you fix it. Our full roundup: the best free accessibility checkers.

Code-level scanners crawl several pages, often many, and report each problem with the element and the rule it breaks. The better ones tell you how certain each finding is and what to change.

Sitejar (our product) loads each page in a real headless browser and tests accessibility against WCAG 2.1 AA, alongside security, privacy, deceptive design, technical quality and SEO. Every finding is labelled Confirmed, Likely or Needs review, and SURE proposes source-level fixes to review. Nothing is applied to your site automatically. The free guest scan covers 5 pages with no signup and takes about 2 minutes. Paid plans add more pages and sites, PDF reports, an accessibility statement builder, an executive report and an ACR draft. There is also a REST API and an MCP server for AI coding assistants. Limits: it is automated, reads public pages only, and does not certify compliance.

Pope Tech is a cloud accessibility platform and the option WAVE's own home page points to for checking more than one page at a time. Its free plan covers 25 pages, more than Sitejar's free scan, and paid plans start at $25 a month billed annually ($30 monthly) for 50 pages.

Siteimprove is an enterprise digital governance platform with accessibility checking, and offers a free checker for a single page. For platform pricing, check Siteimprove's site. It suits large organisations managing many sites.

Strengths: coverage across pages and templates, a list your developers can work through, and a record of progress over time.

Limits: someone still has to change the code. Automated rules still miss what only a person can judge.

Best for: small businesses with a developer, agencies, and in-house teams fixing a whole site.

An expert audit is a person, or a team, evaluating your site by hand. A typical audit covers a representative sample of pages and key journeys (sign-up, checkout, a contact form), using a keyboard and screen readers, and reports each failure against a WCAG success criterion with guidance on fixing it.

Strengths: human judgement on exactly what automation misses: whether alt text is meaningful, whether the reading order makes sense, whether a custom widget works with a screen reader. An audit report carries weight in procurement and legal conversations that an automated scan does not.

Limits: cost and time, both of which depend on scope, and the result is a point-in-time snapshot. Like the other approaches, an audit reports problems; your team still fixes them.

Best for: procurement, an active legal matter, complex web applications, and confirming a site after a round of fixes. If a buyer has asked you for an accessibility conformance report, Sitejar's ACR draft (VPAT® 2.5Rev layout) is a starting point that marks untested criteria for review. It is not a substitute for an expert evaluation (for software vendors).

An overlay is a script added to a site, usually one line of code, that runs in the visitor's browser. Most add a toolbar with options such as larger text, higher contrast or a reading guide, and some try to repair problems automatically, for example by guessing alt text or adding attributes to elements as the page loads.

What it does not do: change your source code. The images, forms and controls your site delivers are the same as before, and a repair made in the browser depends on the script running and guessing correctly, every time, for every visitor and every assistive technology. Many accessibility practitioners argue that this approach cannot deliver conformance: more than a thousand practitioners have signed the Overlay Fact Sheet, which sets out that case (as of 2026-10-27).

Where it can fit: some visitors like display options. If you want a toolbar for that reason, it is a choice about features, not a substitute for fixing the code. If you have one installed and are moving away from it, scan your site first so you know what the underlying code needs.

The FTC's 2025 order. In January 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission announced a proposed order against accessiBe, the named respondent. On 22 April 2025, after a public comment period, the Commission voted 3-0 to approve the final order. It requires accessiBe to pay $1 million and bars it from claiming that its automated tools can make any website WCAG compliant without evidence to support the claim. The order concerned unsupported marketing claims, and it is the reason this page, and our own copy, never says a tool makes a site compliant.

The ADA Title II rule. The US Department of Justice's 2024 rule for state and local governments adopted WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the standard for their web content. After the Department's April 2026 interim final rule, governments serving 50,000 people or more must comply by 26 April 2027, and smaller governments and special district governments by 26 April 2028. The interim rule did not change the standard. The rule sets a standard for the content itself, which is what code-level fixes change and an overlay leaves as it was.

Lawsuits. UsableNet's 2025 year-end report reviewed more than 5,000 ADA-related digital accessibility lawsuits filed in US federal courts and in New York and California state courts. A widget is not evidence that a site is accessible. For more on overlays and lawsuits, see do accessibility overlays protect you from lawsuits?

This page is not legal advice. If you have received a demand letter, talk to a lawyer.

1. Get a baseline. Scan your key pages and templates so you know what the underlying code needs.
2. Fix Confirmed issues first, starting with your highest-traffic templates. A fix in a shared header, footer or form reaches every page that uses it.
3. Test by hand. Walk your key journeys with a keyboard and a screen reader.
4. Publish or update your accessibility statement. Our free accessibility statement generator helps.
5. Remove the widget when you are ready, then scan again to confirm nothing regressed.
6. Scan after each release, so new problems are caught before they reach visitors.

Run your baseline scan →

• Small business, no budget: start with a free checker or a free Sitejar scan, then fix what is Confirmed.
• Small business with a developer: a code-level scanner gives your developer a working list with proposed changes.
• Agency: a code-level scanner across client sites, with reports you can hand over (for agencies).
• Software vendor answering procurement: a code-level scanner for the fixes, then an expert evaluation for the conformance report.
• Large organisation: an enterprise platform or several scanners, plus periodic expert audits.
• Facing a legal claim: a lawyer first, and an expert audit.

An overlay changes what a page does in the browser. The alternatives find what is wrong in the code so it can be fixed for everyone. Start with a free check, use a scanner to cover your pages, bring in an expert where judgement matters, and keep testing by hand.