Accessibility overlays aren’t a shortcut to happiness
Accessibility overlays have been around for a while already, and especially now that more companies are required to provide accessible services, the overlays might feel like a simple and fast solution.
There are some service providers online who claim that all you need to do for accessibility is to get their overlay, and then your website is compliant with any accessibility standards. Unfortunately, that is a false promise. And what is worse, many of the overlay tools create more problems than they solve. In several tests conducted by accessibility experts, overlays have caused accessibility problems.
While the tools might be able to fix some things, they cannot fix everything. No tool can. And that is why they simply cannot make you compliant.
What is an accessibility overlay?
If you’ve never encountered an accessibility overlay, it can be a good thing! That might mean that they aren’t so common. Accessibility overlay is a broad term for technologies that aim (or at least claim to aim) to improve the accessibility of a website. Usually, the tool is added on top of a website, and the third-party source code makes changes to the front-end code of the website. The user can usually access the tool from some kind of icon button in a corner of the website.
The overlays have redundant features
Many of the features the tools provide exist already in the operating systems, browsers, assistive technologies or other software. The benefit of using the existing tools is the ability to get the features on all websites, as well as in software that the user might use. So instead of having to modify settings on each site separately, the user can add their preferences once and get the changes everywhere.
When a user uses these kinds of existing features, an accessibility overlay might interfere with the user’s settings and thus make the site less accessible.
In some of the overlays, there might be some beneficial features as well; the overlays aren’t often all bad. They are also not the solution for accessibility.
User privacy can be lacking
Some tools might detect if the user is using assistive technology. This is personal data that many users might not want to share. So, unless they can opt out of the detection, this is problematic.
Some overlays have been found to persist the user’s settings across sites (saved in cookies) that use the same overlay. And this is a much bigger problem. While this has probably been driven by kindness to try to make people’s lives easier, not allowing users the option to opt out of this is a GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) problem.
There are no real shortcuts to accessibility. In the future, we might see AI or something else come to our aid and help us actually fix issues for each user individually. I really hope we will. But for now, the issues should always be fixed on the site itself.
Instead of spending money on an overlay that might, in the worst case, make accessibility worse, reach out to us and let us help you make your service accessible!
If you still want to use an overlay, make sure you know enough about them and test them for accessibility. Some good sources:
Thoughts by
Sanna Kramsi
Competence Manager,
Senior Accessibility Engineer
11.08.2025
