An overlay widget is not a defence. Courts treat it as an admission.
The accessibility button in the corner of a site is the most-sued fix there is. It runs after the page loads, so screen readers never see it, and it cannot touch the code underneath.
FTC penalty
The best-known overlay vendor was fined $1,000,000 in April 2025 for claiming its widget made sites compliant when it did not.
Still sued
More than 800 businesses running an overlay were sued anyway. In court the widget was treated as evidence they knew and chose a shortcut.
Code fixed
Overlays cannot fix form labels, keyboard traps or heading structure. Those live in the code. So do the claims against you.
How an overlay actually works
An overlay is a single line of JavaScript you paste into your theme. When a shopper loads a page, that script runs after the browser has already built the page, then tries to patch what it finds — guessing at image descriptions, injecting ARIA attributes, bolting on a widget with contrast and font-size toggles.
The important part is what it cannot touch. It does not change your theme’s Liquid templates, your product data, your heading order, or the HTML your server actually sends. It sits on top — a layer of guesses laid over code that still has the original problems underneath.
Overlays don’t stop lawsuits
This isn’t an opinion. In April 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission finalised a $1,000,000 order against accessiBe, one of the largest overlay vendors, for claiming its product could automatically make any site meet WCAG 2.1 AA, and for passing off paid and affiliated reviews as independent (FTC, 2025).
The litigation data says the same thing: 800-plus overlay-using businesses were sued across 2023–2024, and in the first half of 2025, 456 web-accessibility lawsuits — 22.6% of the total — named sites that had an overlay installed (UsableNet / LFLegal, 2025). Buying the widget did not move the risk.
What fixing the source actually looks like
Fixing the source means changing the code a claim is built on. Real alt text is written into each product’s image fields in Shopify, so a screen reader announces “navy wool overcoat, front view” instead of a filename or a guess. Theme corrections happen in the Liquid templates themselves: a single logical heading order, form fields with real <label> elements, variant pickers and the search box properly named, focus states that follow the visual order, colour contrast adjusted in the theme’s own CSS. Those fixes ship in the HTML your server sends, so they work with the shopper’s own assistive technology and survive with or without any widget. That is why source fixes hold up where an overlay does not — though automated tooling reliably resolves only around 30–40% of WCAG issues, and the rest still needs human review.
So skip the shortcut.
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