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Overlay widgets: the promise and the record.
An overlay is a JavaScript snippet that claims to detect and repair accessibility issues on the fly, often marketed as making a site compliant overnight. The claim deserves scrutiny, because a lot of money changes hands on the strength of it.
What the record shows
Hundreds of US lawsuits have been filed against companies whose sites ran an overlay at the time of the complaint; UsableNet's litigation reports have documented this pattern year after year. The Overlay Fact Sheet, signed by hundreds of accessibility practitioners, including many with disabilities, states plainly that overlays do not make a site conformant. In 2023 the FTC fined one overlay vendor one million dollars for overstating exactly these claims.
Why the approach struggles
- Runtime repair cannot fix what it cannot infer: a form field's purpose, an image's meaning, a sensible focus order.
- Many blind and low-vision users report overlays interfering with the assistive technology they already have configured.
- The underlying defects remain in the code, so the legal exposure remains with the site owner.
Where Complaudax stands
Complaudax is not an overlay and injects nothing into your visitors' pages. It is an audit and tracking tool for the people fixing the site: it finds issues, remembers them per client, verifies fixes on re-audit, and documents the result. We will also say the uncomfortable part out loud: no tool, ours included, makes a site compliant by itself. Real remediation is code changes, done by people, and the tooling's job is to make that work visible and provable.
If a client is considering an overlay because it looks cheaper, the guide Do accessibility overlays work? lays out the evidence in a form you can forward.