Overlays don't protect you, and the 2025 numbers prove it

The pitch is seductive: paste one JavaScript snippet into your site and become ADA compliant overnight. No code changes, no audit, no developer. Millions of small businesses bought that pitch.

The court data tells a different story. 1,416 businesses running an accessibility overlay or widget were sued in 2025 anyway. In 2024, about 25% percent of digital accessibility lawsuits targeted companies that already had an overlay installed. The snippet did not stop the lawsuit. In some complaints, the overlay itself is named as a barrier.

Why overlays fail

An overlay sits on top of your page and tries to repair it in the visitor's browser at load time. It does not fix your code. A screen reader still meets the same broken markup underneath, and users of assistive technology frequently report that overlays interfere with the tools they already have configured.

Regulators noticed. In 2025 the FTC fined a major overlay vendor one million dollars for false compliance claims. Federal courts have ruled that installing an overlay does not, by itself, make a website compliant. The legal exposure stays exactly where it was: in your source code.

The alternative is not glamorous, it is just real

Fixing accessibility means fixing the code: the alt text, the contrast values, the labels, the focus order. That work is now largely automatable, and it ships through your platform's own APIs with every change reversible and tested in a sandbox first.

The difference shows up under audit. A remediated site passes the same tests a plaintiff firm runs, because the fixes exist in the markup, not in a script that evaporates when someone views source.

If you have an overlay today

Run a real scan and look at what is still failing underneath the widget. That is the exposure a demand letter would cite. It costs nothing to find out, and the scan takes about a minute.