You don't need an accessibility overlay

· 5 min read

Hi again đź‘‹

This week…

Let’s talk about Accessibility Overlays.

There’s a good chance someone’s pitched your business an accessibility overlay. You might already have one running.

If not - then you’ve probably seen them in the wild. The little button in the corner of the page with an accessibility icon, offering you a range of accessibility options - bigger text, more contrast, wider spacing, and usually something labelled “screen reader mode”.

These are all valid options - but the good news is: you can save that money, by not using an accessibility overlay widget.

But don’t some of your customers need it?

Not from you, no.

If someone has arrived on your website, and they need a form of assistive technology to get around your website - then the two scenarios generally are:

  • They already have their screen reader running, with their specific settings, before they even get to your website, or…
  • Your website is so bad that someone who usually doesn’t need assistive technology now needs it on your website.

Either way - an accessibility overlay is not the answer here.

So you’re saying that it could be making things worse for my users?

Possibly, yes. This is the part that tends to surprise people.

An overlay doesn’t change your website. It sits on top of it and rewrites things as the page loads, which means it spends a lot of time guessing.

It guesses at descriptions for your images, which on your store means it’s guessing at your product photography. It guesses at labels for your form fields. And it takes over keyboard shortcuts that your customer’s screen reader is already using for something else.

The trouble with guessing is what happens when it’s wrong.

If one of your product images has no description, your customer knows there’s a gap, and they’ll go hunting elsewhere on the page for the detail they need. If the overlay invents a description and reads it out confidently, they’ve no way of knowing it’s wrong.

One of those customers is mildly inconvenienced. The other one buys the wrong thing, or gives up.

So where does that leave you?

Whatever’s on your product page stopping someone from buying today is still there tomorrow, widget or not. The overlay sits over the top of it.

So keep the money, and start with a better question instead: can someone buy from you using only a keyboard?

Talk soon,
Dave

P.S. Have you come across one of these in the wild, or had one pitched to you? I’d like to know how it was sold and what you made of it - hit reply and tell me, I read every reply.