A band-aid that also causes injuries

My Monday email about accessibility drew a response from Denis (quoted with permission):

Our site uses the [brand removed] accessibility overlay. Does this satisfy accessibility requirements or is it simply a band-aid?

If you’re wondering what an accessibility overlay is, it’s a third-party script that you add on top of your site in order to improve accessibility. Or, rather, that’s what they promise. You’ve probably seen one before; it adds an icon to the side of the page and clicking it lets users change font-size and adjust other elements.

Credit where it’s due: Denis cared enough to ask; that's more than most site owners manage. But the overlay vendors have taken that goodwill and turned it into a business model, and that business model is the problem.

These things sit on top of your markup rather than fixing it, because they can't fix it. It’s equivalent to painting over a cracked wall and hoping the cracks disappear. And because these widgets are layered on top, they routinely collide with the assistive technologies disabled people already use

Last year, I talked to a disabled person who has custom rules in their ad blocker to remove them because they can’t navigate the site when they’re present!

As is often the case, a “quick fix” is rarely that.

Build with accessibility in mind from the start, it’s not complicated. And if, like Denis, you inherited a legacy site, strip the widget out. Raw beats broken.

Colin