accessiBe alternative: fix the barriers instead of covering them
An overlay widget adds a layer on top of your site; it does not change the code underneath. The missing labels, unnamed buttons and skipped headings are still there for the screen readers and keyboards your customers bring.
In April 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million and barred it from claiming its automated products can make any website WCAG-compliant unless it has evidence to support that.
The alternative is not another widget. It is finding the failures in your pages and fixing them in your theme, once. Most shop failures are a handful of patterns that take minutes each.
What an overlay does, and what it cannot do
An accessibility overlay is a script you add to your site. It usually shows a button that opens a menu of display settings (bigger text, higher contrast, a dyslexia font) and runs automatic "repairs" in the visitor's browser.
The settings menu duplicates what browsers and operating systems already do, and people who rely on assistive technology have usually configured those already. The automatic repairs guess at things a script cannot know: what an icon link does, what a product photo shows, which field a stray label belongs to. When the guess is wrong, the page is worse than before, and the original code is unchanged for anyone the script does not reach.
More than 1,000 accessibility practitioners have signed the Overlay Fact Sheet, which says that no overlay can make a website fully compliant with any accessibility standard, and calls for their removal.
What the FTC said
In January 2025 the FTC alleged that accessiBe's claims that its accessWidget plug-in could make any website compliant with WCAG were false, misleading or unsubstantiated, and that the company had formatted third-party articles and reviews to look independent without disclosing its connections to the reviewers. The final order, approved on 22 April 2025, requires a $1 million payment and bars accessiBe from claiming that its automated products can make any website WCAG-compliant, or keep it compliant, unless it has evidence to support the claim. (FTC case page.)
For a shop owner the practical point is narrower: a widget is not a defence. US demand letters and German Abmahnungen describe failures in the site's own code, and sites with an overlay installed are still sued. Our German article on widgets covers the BFSG side.
What to do instead
- Find the failures. Run a free automated check of your home page, a collection and a product page. Our scanner does this with no account; WAVE and Lighthouse are good free options too.
- Fix them where they live: in the theme. The common shop failures are icon links with no name (cart, account, social icons), form fields with no label (search, newsletter), images with no description, and skipped heading levels. Each is a small change to a template, made once for every page.
- Check what automation cannot. Tab through your checkout with the keyboard alone, and try your product page with a screen reader (VoiceOver on a Mac or iPhone, NVDA on Windows, both free). Automated checks find roughly a third of barriers.
- Publish an accessibility statement that says honestly what works and what does not yet. Our free generator writes one in the form the European Accessibility Act asks for.
Widget or fix: side by side
| Question | Overlay widget | Fixing the code |
|---|---|---|
| Changes the code assistive technology reads | No, it patches the page in the browser after load | Yes |
| Works when the script is blocked or slow | No | Yes |
| Cost over time | A monthly subscription, for as long as the site runs | A one-off fix per pattern; check again when the theme changes |
| Counts as a defence in a claim | No; sites with overlays are sued regularly | Fixed failures are no longer there to be claimed |
| Adds weight to every page | Yes, an extra script on every page load | No |
Where Limen fits
Limen is a checker, not a widget: it changes nothing on your site. The check of any page is free and shows every confirmed failure with its WCAG criterion. The Fix Pack ($99, one-off) shows every occurrence with its line and markup, with fix code for Shopify, WooCommerce, Shopware, WordPress or plain HTML. Disclosure: Limen is our product.
If your shop runs on a Shopify theme, start with our ranking of 49 themes: the theme's failures are in every shop that uses it unchanged.
Sources
- Federal Trade Commission, accessiBe Inc., case 222-3156: complaint and proposed order (January 2025), final order (22 April 2025)
- Overlay Fact Sheet, signed by accessibility practitioners
- W3C, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1
This article is not legal advice. It describes the FTC's published order and general accessibility practice as of 10 October 2026.