What the letters actually want
When a letter arrives, the first instinct is to look for something you can install. That instinct is the entire business model of accessibility overlays: paste one script, get a badge, move on. It feels like closing the hole.
Read the letter again, though. It is rarely a philosophical document — it is a list. Specific URLs, specific barriers, usually found by a person driving a real screen reader (NVDA, JAWS or VoiceOver) through a real checkout flow. What the sender is angling for comes down to three things:
- The barriers gone. Not masked, not adjustable from a toolbar. Removed from the page that ships to everyone.
- Evidence you are working on it. A remediation plan with dates, owners and a sequence. Dated beats detailed.
- A public commitment. An accessibility statement that says what you test, how you test it, and what is still broken.
Most complaints still cite WCAG 2.1 AA, even though WCAG 2.2 AA has been the current standard since 2023. That gap matters when you decide what to fix, and we come back to it below.
What overlays actually do
An accessibility overlay is a JavaScript file that loads after your page does. It typically adds a floating icon, a panel of user controls — bigger text, higher contrast, a larger cursor, sometimes a reading mask — and a set of runtime guesses: ARIA attributes injected here, a machine-generated alt string there.
Here is the part the marketing skips. Screen readers do not read the styled surface. They walk the accessibility tree the browser builds from your markup, so the layer that gets adjusted is not the layer being judged. In practice that means:
- A product image with no
altis still an unlabelled image, or picks up a machine guess like "shirt" on a page selling forty shirts. - A
<div>wired up as a button is still a div. No role, no keyboard behaviour, frequently unreachable without a mouse. - An unlabelled form field is still unlabelled — your checkout, your account signup, your newsletter box.
- Text that fails contrast at 3.2:1 keeps failing for everyone who never opens the widget panel, which is nearly everyone.
There is a second-order problem too. Injected ARIA lands on top of markup that a screen reader is already interpreting, and the two can contradict each other. That is a common reason assistive-technology users close these widgets on sight rather than use them.
Three facts worth knowing before you buy one
3. The firms sending letters test with real assistive technology. They run a screen reader against your live storefront before anything is filed, so a widget changes nothing in their results. Some complaints have gone further and cited the presence of an overlay icon as evidence that the business was aware of its accessibility obligations and did not remediate. The badge is visible to everyone except the software that matters.
What works instead
None of this is exotic. It is the same three moves any accessibility consultant will sell you, minus the retainer.
- Find the real failures. Scan every template, not just the homepage — product page, collection, cart, search, account, contact. One broken template repeats across thousands of URLs, and that is exactly how testers find you.
- Fix them in the code. Alt text that describes the actual product. Contrast that passes at 4.5:1. Keyboard navigation with a visible focus ring and a sane tab order. A label on every form field. Headings in order, and link text that still means something read out of context.
- Write it down, with dates. A remediation plan (what, who, by when), re-scans on a schedule, and a published accessibility statement. This is the good-faith artifact. In a settlement conversation it is often the only thing you hold that is worth anything.
Build to WCAG 2.2 AA, not 2.1
WCAG 2.2 has been the current version since 2023. It keeps everything in 2.1 and adds criteria that land directly on e-commerce: a minimum target size for tap targets, focus that is not obscured by sticky headers, an alternative to drag-only interactions, help placed consistently, no redundant re-entry of information you already collected, and authentication that does not depend on a memory test. Since most demand letters still cite 2.1 AA, conforming to 2.2 AA answers this letter and the next one.
Selling into Europe? Different clock, same work
The European Accessibility Act has been enforceable since June 2025, and it reaches non-EU businesses that sell to EU consumers. Each member state implements it nationally — in Germany that is the Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz (BFSG), with its own reporting route and market-surveillance authority. The EU expects an accessibility statement describing what you tested, the method you used, and the gaps you know about. An overlay cannot write that statement, because it does not know what your failures are.
| Answers a letter | Does not |
|---|---|
| Code-level fixes in your theme, on the templates that were cited | A widget icon in the corner of every page |
| A dated remediation plan with owners and deadlines | A vendor certificate or a "compliant" badge |
| A published accessibility statement with a real contact channel | ARIA guessed at runtime by a script |
| Scheduled re-scans and a kept, timestamped record | A single scan of the homepage |
If a letter already arrived, start the paper trail this week
Abledly scans your live pages with two engines plus an AI review layer, hands you the code-level fixes, and generates the dated accessibility statement and audit trail. It is not an overlay — nothing is injected into your storefront.
What we will not tell you: that any of this makes you lawsuit-proof. No tool does, and the vendors who claimed otherwise are the reason this page exists.
Frequently asked questions
Will an accessibility overlay stop an ADA demand letter?
No. An overlay is JavaScript that loads on top of your page, so the HTML a screen reader reads stays exactly as it was. Demand letters list barriers found on specific pages, usually tested with a real screen reader, and those barriers are still present after the widget loads. Plaintiffs' firms are aware of overlays: some complaints have pointed to the overlay icon itself as evidence that the business knew about accessibility and did not remediate.
What did the FTC action against accessiBe in 2025 actually say?
In 2025 the Federal Trade Commission settled with accessiBe, a leading overlay vendor, for $1 million over claims that its AI widget could make a website WCAG compliant. It is a federal enforcement action about the marketing promise itself. If you bought an overlay because of a compliance guarantee, that guarantee is the specific thing the FTC acted on.
I already received a demand letter. What should I do first?
Talk to a lawyer, then start the record the same week. Run a real scan across your live templates, write a remediation plan with dates and owners, fix the critical code-level failures first (alt text, colour contrast, keyboard navigation and focus order, form labels), and publish a dated accessibility statement. A documented, dated plan is the good-faith artifact that settlement conversations turn on. This is general information, not legal advice.
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