Services · Compliance & standards
Overlay Exit Audit: What to Fix Before You Pull the Widget
For the owner who bought an accessibility widget in good faith, has since read the record, and wants out without leaving a single user worse off on the way.
What We Keep Finding
You installed the overlay because it promised one line of code and compliance. The public record went the other way. The tracker that follows these cases counted 1,416 US accessibility lawsuits in 2025 against sites that already had a widget running, against 1,023 the year before, and both counts come with the tracker's own caveats about how its year is cut. The Federal Trade Commission approved a final order requiring a major vendor to pay $1 million that may be used to provide refunds to consumers, on terms where the vendor neither admitted nor denied any of the allegations. And the National Federation of the Blind condemned the practices of the category outright. None of that comes from us. It is all published, and you can go and read it.
Pulling the widget without a plan just uncovers whatever it was papering over, and the vendors have already told you what that is. The biggest of them publishes a list of what its product does not fix, and it runs to 15 categories, including single-page apps, images with the text baked in, CAPTCHAs, PDFs, video, and third-party iframes. That list is the starting point for what your site has been hiding, written by the company you bought it from.
One more thing to check before you assume you even have one. An overlay is not always a script tag from an overlay company any more. It arrives as a module inside a website governance platform, and it arrives as a WordPress plugin, one of which has more than half a million active installations and bundles a widget alongside a statement generator. So the first job is often working out what is actually running on your pages.
What We Check
- Audit your site as it really is, with the overlay switched off
- Work out what is actually injecting, since a governance module or a plugin counts too
- List what the widget was masking, starting from the vendor's own excluded-issues list
- Test with real blind screen-reader users, the people overlays are sold as serving
- Check whether your vendor has been writing fixes into its own layer, because those leave with it
- Sequence the work, so you know what must land before removal day and what can follow
- Document the before and the after, your report now and the half-price re-audit once it is gone
What You Get
Every service on this site runs the same three-pass engine: an automated scan, an expert review of all 55 WCAG 2.2 A and AA rules, and a hands-on session with a professional blind screen-reader user. You get one report with every finding screenshotted, ranked by user impact, and linked to its fix. Your team fixes, we verify: the re-audit is half price within 3 months.
The format is not a mystery either. Read the sample report before you spend anything.
The Honest Limit
One honest limit. We do not remove the widget for you. That is one line your developer deletes, and for a plain script tag it really does take about a minute. Where a vendor has spent two years applying managed fixes inside its own runtime, deleting that line takes those with it, and the report names which ones so nothing disappears by surprise on removal day. One vendor says the same thing about its own product in its own documentation, which is that ending the subscription leaves the error back in your HTML.
What It Costs
Rapid Audit: $499, up to 10 pages you pick, report in 5 business days. Standard Audit: $1,499, up to 25 pages in 10 business days. Flat rates, no discovery calls, and a real blind screen-reader user on every engagement. Pick your pages. We bring the humans.
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