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Why not overlays
Overlay widgets promise one-line accessibility. They do not deliver it, and they have done real damage to trust in this category. We took the opposite position.
Verassa evidence protocol
Evidence
01Screenshot, DOM, replay, and axe baseline captured before decisions.
Judgment
02Reviewer route, rationale, and owner stay attached to lower-confidence work.
Verification
03Re-scan records and disclaimers travel with reportable outputs.
What an overlay is
An accessibility overlay is a script you add to a site that claims to detect and fix accessibility barriers in the browser, automatically. The appeal is obvious: no audit, no engineering work, a badge for the footer.
The barriers that matter most cannot be fixed by a script layered over a page. A broken keyboard flow, a custom widget with the wrong semantics, a form that does not identify its errors — these need changes to the underlying product. Independent testing has repeatedly found overlays leave serious barriers in place, and at times introduce new ones.
The trust problem
Overlays created a trust problem for everyone else in the category. Disabled users have reported overlays interfering with their own assistive technology. Accessibility advocates and regulators have publicly rejected them. Litigation has named overlay-protected sites rather than sparing them.
The result is a buyer who has heard the phrase automatic accessibility before and has good reason to be skeptical. That skepticism is healthy. We would rather earn trust slowly than borrow a promise that has already been broken.
What we do instead
We do not build, recommend, or integrate overlay widgets. The platform produces findings backed by evidence, routes them through qualified human review, and tracks remediation in the actual product.
That is more work than installing a script. It is also the only thing that removes a barrier for a disabled person rather than hiding it.
A demo runs the evidence-backed workflow on a site you choose.