Accessibility Overlays – What Is It? Why You Shouldn’t Use It?

Many advocates have pushed organizations to make the world wide web more accessible to everyone including for users with disabilities. However, most websites in the United States today are not accessible to individuals that are blind, visually impaired, deaf, and/or hard of hearing. Today, large organizations are facing lawsuits due to lack of digital and web accessibility publicly available to customers with disabilities. One notable example is the recent Domino’s case review provided by the Law Office of Lainey Feingold.

In recent years, there has been a trend of new organizations claiming they have an accessible way to make websites more accessible. These technologies use accessibility overlays that aim to improve the accessibility needs of a website. According to the Overlay Fact Sheet, many organizations consider applying third-party source code (typically JavaScript) to make improvements to the front-end code of the website.

Notable websites that use overlays:

  • AccessiBe
  • AudioEye
  • EqualWeb
  • True Accessibility
  • UserWay

The ineffectiveness of overlays is something that has broad agreement among accessibility practitioners, per the WebAIM Survey of Web Accessibility Practitioners which found:

“A strong majority (67%) of respondents rate these tools as not at all or not very effective. Respondents with disabilities were even less favorable with 72% rating them not at all or not very effective, and only 2.4% rating them as very effective.”

In conclusion, no easy-cutter solution will help as it will do more harm than good. Today, organizations need to make every cautious effort to prioritize accessibility.

References:

Law Office of Lainey Feingold. (2021). Another Big Win in the Domino’s Pizza Accessibility Saga. Retrieved January 4, 2022, from https://www.lflegal.com/2021/06/dominos-june-2021/

Overlay Fact Sheet. (2021). Overlay Fact Sheet. Retrieved January 4, 2022, from https://overlayfactsheet.com/#strengths-and-weaknesses-of-overlay-widgets

WebAIM. (2021, January 26). WebAIM: Survey of Web Accessibility Practitioners #3 Results. Retrieved January 4, 2022, from https://webaim.org/projects/practitionersurvey3/#overlay

About Dylan M. Rafaty

Dylan is an author, disability rights activist, founder of the North Texas Disability Chamber, and is employed by C-Hear, Inc. as the Head of Accessibility Strategy & Partnerships.

Hashtags: #a11y #Accessibility #Overlays #Lawsuits

Tags:

No responses yet

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Zero Trust Approach to Cyber Security The National […]
Dual use technology is technology that can be […]
Many advocates have pushed organizations to make the […]
The concept of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is relatively […]