Guide · overlays and the EAA

Do accessibility overlays make your shop EAA compliant?

Short answer: no. An overlay is a script that adds a toolbar and tries to patch your pages in the visitor's browser. The European Accessibility Act asks for an accessible service, which means fixing the site itself.

What an overlay does

Overlays inject JavaScript that offers visitors options such as larger text, contrast modes or a reading guide, and attempts to repair some problems automatically, for example by guessing alt text for images or adding labels. The underlying theme, templates and content stay exactly as they were.

Why that is not enough

• Automatic repairs are guesses. A generated alt text cannot know that a product photo shows the navy version, side view. A guessed label on a size picker can be wrong. Wrong information can be worse than none.
• Disabled users often already have better tools. Screen reader users, people who zoom or use high contrast set this up in their own device. A second layer of controls on top can conflict with them.
• The law targets the service. The EAA and its harmonised standard EN 301 549 describe requirements for the website itself. A widget does not change what your checkout, menu or product pages are made of.
• Regulators have taken action over compliance claims. In April 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission finalised an order requiring overlay vendor accessiBe to pay $1 million over unsupported claims that its product could make any website compliant with accessibility guidelines.
• The accessibility community is largely against them. Hundreds of accessibility practitioners have signed the public Overlay Fact Sheet, which advises against relying on overlays.

What to do instead

1. Find the real issues. Scan your key pages: home, category, product, cart and checkout.
2. Fix them at the source. Most shop issues live in a handful of theme templates: icon buttons without names, missing alt text, low-contrast colours, unlabelled form fields. One template fix often clears dozens of instances.
3. Check by hand. Shop once using only the keyboard, zoom to 200% and listen to a product page with a screen reader.
4. Publish an accessibility statement that honestly describes your status. Our free generator does this in two minutes.

If you already pay for an overlay, you can keep it while you fix the site, but do not count on it for compliance, and remove any claim that it makes your shop "fully compliant".

General information, not legal advice.