An overlay-free accessibility checker.
An overlay-free accessibility checker audits your website’s real source code against WCAG instead of injecting a widget that patches the page in the browser. AccessKnight is overlay-free by design: it scans any page, scores it 0–100, and gives you the exact code fix for every issue — with nothing to install and no script running on your site.
✓ No widget · ✓ No signup to scan · ✓ WCAG + AI readability
What an accessibility overlay is
An overlay (also called an accessibility widget) is a snippet of JavaScript you paste into your site. It loads on every page and tries to adjust accessibility — alt text, ARIA, contrast, focus — in the visitor’s browser at runtime. Vendors like accessiBe and UserWay built their businesses on this model, often marketed as near-automatic ADA or WCAG compliance.
The appeal is obvious: one line of code, and the problem is supposedly handled. The reality is that the overlay changes what renders — not the code underneath that assistive technology, search crawlers, and AI engines actually read.
Why overlay-free matters
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission ordered accessiBe to pay $1M in 2025 over claims that its automated widget could make any website WCAG-compliant. The final order bars such claims without evidence to back them.
Accessibility professionals — including engineers from Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Shopify — signed the Overlay Fact Sheet opposing overlay/widget products as a compliance solution.
Roughly a quarter of U.S. digital-accessibility lawsuits in 2024 named businesses that had an accessibility overlay installed (UsableNet). A widget on the page does not stop the lawsuit.
The pattern is consistent: overlays don’t fix the source, don’t reliably satisfy the standard, and don’t stop the lawsuits. The accessibility community reached this conclusion years ago; in 2025 a federal regulator reached it too.
Overlay vs. real audit
- Injects a third-party script on every page load
- Patches the rendered page, not your source code
- Can conflict with a user's own assistive tech
- Invisible to crawlers & AI engines that read raw HTML
- Ongoing subscription; remove it and the "fixes" vanish
- Installs nothing — it's an external scanner
- Fixes your actual code, once, with copy-paste snippets
- Works with real assistive technology, not against it
- Clean semantic HTML that humans and AI can both read
- A dated, defensible audit trail of what you fixed
What AccessKnight does instead
AccessKnight fetches a page, runs it against every WCAG 2.1 rule, and returns a 0–100 score, an A–F grade, and each failing element with a plain-English, copy-paste fix. Fix the source once and it stays fixed for everyone — no widget required, whether or not AccessKnight is watching.
It also scores AI readability: whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google’s AI can parse and cite your page. Both scores come from the same clean markup — so one overlay-free scan tells you if humans and machines can read your site.