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There are a few different ways to avoid accessibility issues and ensure websites, apps and their content are accessible. In addition to proper testing and writing accessible code by default, you can also make use of different plugins (or modules, in an ecosystem such as Drupal’s) to help with accessibility.
Many of these plugins can be very useful as an add-on to already accessible design, development and content management – for example, accessibility scanners, plugins for alternative text, plugins to help content managers produce accessible content, and plugins that simulate specific disabilities.
But there’s one category of accessibility plugins that’s controversial and fails to actually solve the problems it promises to solve – accessibility overlays.
Accessibility overlays appear on websites as little widgets in a corner of the site with the accessibility icon. Upon clicking it, a toolbar opens with various controls to quickly and easily adjust the front-end features of the site, with the aim of making the experience more accessible and customisable.
On the surface, this seems great. Even a developer specialising in accessibility may think this when first learning about accessibility overlays. Diving just a little deeper, however, quickly reveals the inherent issues with relying on an overlay to make your site accessible.
The thing is – they don’t actually make your site accessible. Not in the legal sense. And, very often, not even in the usable sense. Let’s dive deeper.
The underlying issues of accessibility overlays
Accessibility overlays work by inserting third-party JavaScript code onto the website to make adjustments to its front end. These typically include the basic elements of a website’s accessibility, such as colour contrast and saturation, text size and alignment, spacing, link highlighting, hiding images, etc.
While this may seem like a silver bullet for fixing accessibility, overlays have several inherent issues that make them far less useful to people with disabilities than it may seem to a lay person. Among the less worrying ones are issues with privacy and security, but there are a few more serious ones that should be highlighted:
- Overlays tend to be optimised for the desktop experience, and so likely won’t function optimally on mobile devices.
- People with disabilities already make use of assistive technologies and browser settings to access content; the settings of overlays may interfere with those, resulting in a more frustrating, less usable experience rather than a more accessible one.
Doing accessibility right requires a more substantial investment of time and other resources, especially when tacked on at the end of development rather than being prioritised from the start.
New projects don’t suffer from this as much, but it’s an understandable challenge for existing websites and apps that now need to legally guarantee accessibility since the European Accessibility Act coming into effect in June 2025.
In cases where a company’s first priority is to avoid legal issues, using an overlay plugin to “fix” their accessibility unfortunately seems like the option that’s at the same time cost-effective, legally compliant and technically compliant.
So, since proper accessible development is often more expensive, overlays are often used as a cop out to avoid lawsuits and other legal ramifications. The problem is that the promises made by these kinds of tools are misleading and often based on deceptive marketing.
Because of the issues highlighted above, overlays can never actually help you achieve full legal compliance with accessibility standards such as WCAG, nor laws such as EAA and ADA.
Diving deeper into practical issues of overlays
Q: “Could overlays be helpful on a site with good accessibility?”
A: “Why would you need overlays on a site with good accessibility?”
As mentioned earlier, overlays may function well enough for a lay person who does not require special accessibility care. Trying it out for myself, these were my main observations:
- Some parts function well: colour contrast, text spacing, link highlighting, etc. One issue with the site on which I was trying this out was that links were not auto-highlighted, and so the site wasn’t keyboard navigable without enabling this via the widget. This is a clear example of foregoing default accessibility in favour of the overlay widget.
- Some parts are completely broken: the widget offers a control to adjust text size, but making the text bigger hides part of the text rather than repositioning it to still fit the page. This is not just poor user experience, but in fact literally makes the content inaccessible.
→ Verdict: accessibility overlays offer a subpar experience even to a person without disabilities, and they’re not even the one that this feature is intended for.
What to do instead of relying on overlays for accessibility
As demonstrated, accessibility overlays don’t actually satisfy accessibility standards. Despite the higher costs, it’s thus essential to invest in proper accessibility, both from the legal and the usability standpoint. What does that look like, exactly?
- Firstly, if you aren’t already, start treating accessibility as an inseparable part of usability and user experience – rather than just as an afterthought that satisfies legal requirements.
- If you don’t have accessibility specialists in house, get help from external experts, such as development agencies with proven and certified web accessibility specialists on their team who can work on your website’s accessibility.
- Make use of both automated accessibility checks and manual testing, ideally done by these same specialists to ensure no issues slip through the cracks. These will reveal your key priorities to focus on immediately as well as future steps.
- For existing websites, prioritise critical issues as well as the most visited and/or best converting pages of your website.
- For new websites, make accessibility a key consideration from the very start of design and development, ideally already in the specifications and/or project brief themselves.
Conclusion
Even though they seem promising on the surface, accessibility overlays are not actually helpful for navigating the web, nor do they satisfy legal accessibility requirements.
Whether you’re actually committed to improving your accessibility or you’re simply worried about legal repercussions, the optimal approach remains the same: don’t use accessibility overlay plugins. Just make your site accessible. It’s more than worth it.
In case you need any help from proven web accessibility specialists, you can start with our quick free audit, or reach out directly for more specific inquiries that our certified accessibility experts can help you with.
