Hi, a quick google search shows that these widgets are NOT accessible?
These are plugins that companies add to their websites to make them WCAG complaint, but it seems that these add-ons as a matter of fact do nothing, and are more of a scam for companies to pay these corporations a hefty monthly fee, believing they are safe from lawsuits?
Thanks
Comments
Pretty much.
They don't do much and aren't actually useful.
overlays make things worse
I've only ever seen AccessiBe on a couple of sites and it made things worse. I was booking a flight with British Airways, and it brought up an option to save my outgoing and incoming flights, then I hit the 'save' button, and I couldn't go any further. It kept taking me back to the page again, and I couldn't add my payment details or whatever. Funnily enough, when I turned AccessiBe off, the site worked fine. AccessiBe is sending the wrong message to companies who don't know any better: things can be fixed with just a few lines of code. Yeah right. Check out this Reddit thread which explains more.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/13eno41/what_is_your_opinion_on_the_apology_issued_by_the/
Thanks
I was thinking of creating a competitor to Userway and AccessiBe, to create a similar offering to these type of services, with the aim to help the community with my take of a plugin.
Already had the domain, and an outline of the work needed to create the plugin.
Fortunately enough, stumbled upon complaints and CLAs before starting any development work!
Kind of sad to know these overlays do not work,
but at the same time relieved that I avoided sinking more time (and money) into this offering.
Selling Fear
These overlay companies are preying on the fears of companies of getting sued and selling them a garbage product that ends up excluding more people. You can fix the code, but you can't fix user interaction and logical order. I'd tell businesses that they can save the money and hire a web dev to do simple things like label form fields and add alt text and they'll be miles ahead. there's no excuse for inaccessible websites in 2024.
Wow. Fun you're mentioning them here!
Like just 3 weeks ago I was looking for some web a11y stuff and I came across this beautiful article I'll link here.
https://commlawgroup.com/2024/accessibe-faces-class-action-lawsuit-over-alleged-misrepresentation-of-ada-compliance-and-ai-accessibility-capabilities/
It's disgusting that such a market even exists.
Recently Appearing on Accessibe's Website...
Interestingly enough, the maintenance portal used by my landlord and his company uses Accessibe. I actually found it helped out a bit, and was in fact pleased to discover that Accessibe recently apologized to the NFB for talking the talk but not walking it. Apparently there was at one point a letter written to Accessibe regarding their tactic, and they've since reversed course or something like that. I guess to a degree it depends on the website in question. I've never seen Userway or any other ones like this though. As for my landlord and his crew, they are very responsive and my landlord even asked me awhile back if the portal worked with my screen reader. At the time it had just been implemented, and I don't think Accessibe had been added yet. I told the landlord that the portal was okay but had some accessibility issues. So I guess he has been in conversation with the web portal developers.