A one-line script promising instant WCAG compliance is an appealing pitch: no developer time, no audit, no rewrite. It is also, according to both the lawsuit data and a recent US regulator, not what it claims to be.

What the FTC found

In January 2025, the US Federal Trade Commission ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million over claims about its accessWidget overlay. The company had claimed that installing "one line of code" makes a website "compliant with 30% of WCAG's requirements immediately and initiates an AI process that makes the website fully compliant with the remaining 70% of WCAG requirements within 48 hours." The FTC's order found that claim false, and now bars the company from making it.

Why a script cannot fix this

Overlays run in the browser, adjusting things like font size, contrast toggles and a few ARIA attributes on top of the existing page. What they cannot touch is the underlying markup: missing alt text on an image, a form field with no real label, a heading structure that skips levels, a focus order that does not match the visual layout. Automated tools, overlays included, catch an estimated 20 to 30% of WCAG issues at best. The rest needs a human looking at the actual code.

The lawsuit data does not support the pitch

UsableNet’s 2025 report found that 28% of all digital accessibility lawsuits that year targeted websites that already had an overlay installed, up from 25% in 2024. Separately, 1,416 businesses running an overlay were sued over accessibility anyway in 2025. An overlay did not prevent the lawsuit it was pitched to prevent, in well over a thousand recorded cases in a single year.

What actually helps

  • Fix markup at the source: alt text, labels, heading order and focus order, in the code itself, not with a script layered on top.
  • Treat an overlay, if you keep one, as an assistive convenience for visitors who want it, not a compliance strategy.
  • Test with a real screen reader occasionally, since that is closer to how the overlay's claims get checked in practice than a quick visual glance.

AuditMerlin’s free scan runs 11 WCAG 2.2 AA markup checks directly against your page’s actual code, alt text, labels, heading order, link text and more, alongside its security and AI Act checks. It will not tell you your site is compliant, nothing automated can promise that honestly, but it will tell you which of those markup faults are actually present.