An honest accessiBe alternative for EAA compliance
If you're comparing overlay widgets to something else, here's a plain look at what each approach actually does — and doesn't do — for European Accessibility Act compliance.
Why people look for an alternative
In April 2025, the FTC fined accessiBe $1 million for deceptive claims that its overlay provided automated compliance. The FTC order also covered misleading advertising practices around those claims.
More than 800 businesses using overlay widgets have been sued over website accessibility despite having an overlay installed.
The European Commission's position is that overlay widgets alone do not achieve EAA compliance. That matters for any EU business trying to work out what actually counts as a defensible response.
To be fair: what overlays actually do
Overlay widgets aren't nothing. A typical overlay installs in minutes with a single script tag, gives visitors adjustable font-size and contrast toggles, and can apply some automated ARIA fixes at runtime. For a site with no accessibility work at all, that's a fast way to offer some visible accommodations to visitors.
The problem isn't that overlays do nothing — it's what they don't do, and what regulators and courts have said about relying on them alone.
Overlay vs monitoring: two different theories
An overlay modifies your page at runtime, in the visitor's browser. Your underlying code doesn't change. When a visitor disables JavaScript, uses certain assistive technology configurations, or when a regulator's automated pre-suit scan reads your source HTML directly, the underlying issues are usually still there.
Monitoring takes a different approach: it finds code-level issues and hands them to your developers to actually fix at the source, and it produces evidence documents — scan reports, accessibility statements — that show what was tested, when, and what was done about it. That evidence is what enforcement processes and courts tend to look at.
Side by side
| Overlay widget | AccessProof | |
|---|---|---|
| Approach | Runtime script modifies the page in the browser | Scans source code and page structure, reports issues for developers to fix |
| What regulators/courts see | Underlying HTML is unchanged; automated pre-suit scans typically detect the original issues | Issues addressed at the code level, with a dated record of what was found and fixed |
| Code-level fixes | No | Yes — issues are routed to your own developers |
| Evidence documents | Not typically produced | Legal-risk ranked reports, PDF evidence reports, accessibility statement generator |
| Price range | From around $49/month | Free 5-page scan; monitoring from €29/month (coming soon) |
Our honest limits
Automated scanning — including ours — detects roughly 30% of WCAG success criteria. Nobody can automate full compliance, including us. Manual accessibility audits, which can catch what automated tools can't, typically cost $20,000–60,000 for a full-cycle review or $100–250 per page. Automated monitoring is a starting point and an ongoing discipline, not a substitute for that deeper work when your risk profile calls for it.
See where your site actually stands
Run a free scan of up to 5 pages against WCAG 2.1 A/AA and EN 301 549 — no signup required.