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Accessibility Industry Update: January 2025

Home » Blogs/Events » Accessibility Industry Update: January 2025

Happy New Year, everyone!

This edition was a tad late in light of the holiday season, but there’s a lot to cover as January is already fixing to be a busy month in the world of digital accessibility.

As always, let us know if you think we’ve missed something, or share the link with your colleagues or partners who may benefit from some or all of this information. You can also sign up to receive these accessibility updates via email.

Contents:

AccessiBe Faces Fines (Again) 

It’s been an exceedingly rough couple of months for the creators of accessibility overlay products, accessiBe lead among them. 

What is an Accessibility Overlay? 

Overlays are third-party tools or widgets that purport to be able to improve the accessibility of a website by making real-time modifications to the source-code of webpages that they are placed on.  

In brief, it works like this: 

  • A company pays an overlay provider for access to the tool. 
  • The company is then given a code snippet that they can apply to any of the pages that they wish to make accessible. 
  • When the page is loaded by a user, the snippet tries to detect whether accessibility software like screen readers are in use. If so, the code of the page is updated by the overlay script to (theoretically) fix the issue. 

Sounds great, right? Not really. These solutions have in many cases been reported to actually worsen the user experience, sometimes making a page even less accessible than it was before. 

There are two fundamental problems with this approach. First, as any web developer can attest to, it is difficult to mask an underlying site-wide issue by simply adding code on top. Secondly, even in an age of generative AI and large language models, automated issue detection remains a significant challenge. After all, you can’t effectively fix a problem if you don’t know that it’s there in the first place. 

In 2023, the Year-End Report from UsableNet found that around 30% of state and federal lawsuits were filed against websites using these overlays. In 2024, 1,023 companies with an overlay received a lawsuit, which is consistent with the figure from last year. 

Additionally, in a WebAIM Survey of Web Accessibility Practitioners, 67% of respondents rated overlay tools as “not at all” or “not very” effective. 72% of respondents with disabilities rated them negatively. 

So, What Happened? 

In June of 2024, accessiBe was hit with a Class Action Lawsuit claiming AI-based overlays cannot ensure compliance as advertised. Fast forward to January, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is now forcing them to pay $1 million due to deceptive advertising and providing compensation to reviewers without disclosing that they had done so. You can read more on the FTC Press Release or from this TechCrunch Article. 

Community Reaction 

One thing to note is that the settlement is not final, only proposed. Anyone who has been impacted by the use of an accessiBe widget (e.g., “click here to use this website in a screen reader mode”) is encouraged to take a minute and leave some feedback, which can be done here: https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/FTC-2025-0002-0001 

Public response has been mixed. On one hand, you have groups of people that are glad to see federal acknowledgement of an issue that’s gotten extensive press over the past few years. “It feels good to be heard, I’m just glad that something is being done. Hopefully ,this will cause other vendors to take notice,” writes one prominent advocate. 

That said, a good majority of users believe the settlement isn’t enough. Given that AccessiBe’s revenue in 2024 was estimated at around $52 million, $1 million could seem like a drop in the bucket or just “the cost of doing business”. 

Notably absent in any of the social media posts I’ve read, and there have been a lot, is any attempt to back up or support accessiBe here. 

You can learn more about these overlays and why they are disliked so strongly by people with impairments and accessibility practitioners in any of the aforementioned complaints or on this Overlay Fact Sheet. 

The data is in! 

For the past six years, UsabilityNet has published an annual Year-End Report tracking digital accessibility lawsuits, isolating trends that can then be used to discover wider insights about the direction of the industry overall. The report touches on cases filed across the eleven numbered federal circuits. Here is a quick breakdown of the data: 

More than 4,000 cases were reviewed, including 1,600 filed in state courts and 2,400 in federal courts. Put another way, around 60% of cases were handled in federal courts, while around 40% were handled in state courts. 

  • 40% of the state cases were filed in either California or New York. 
  • New York leads in lawsuit filings across both federal and state courts. 
  • 961 lawsuits (41% of federal cases) targeted companies with prior ADA lawsuits. Recurrence is often due to unresolved accessibility issues, highlighting a need to act as quickly as possible. 
  • eCommerce represents 77% of all lawsuits, followed by the food service industry (11%). Complex websites with frequent updates are particularly vulnerable, which could explain the heightened surge in eCommerce. 
  • We (QualityLogic) expect to see the number of complaints filed in the healthcare sector rise in 2025 in response to new HHS section 504 requirements. 
  • 67% of lawsuits were filed against businesses with annual revenue under $25 million, reflecting a growing focus on smaller businesses. Many of the larger companies have already faced claims and responded by implementing accessibility measures. 
  • 30% of the top 500 eCommerce retailers were sued in 2024, totaling 150 cases. 
  • Since 2018, 411 (82%) of these 500 retailers have faced ADA lawsuits. 
  • 1,023 companies with accessibility overlays or widgets (like AccessiBe) on their websites were sued. Plaintiffs cited these tools as barriers to access and violations of WCAG standards. 
  • 77% of all cases were handled by just 10 plaintiff law firms, whereas the top 10 defense law firms accounted for less than 10% of federal cases. 
    • Plaintiff law firms, the ones doing the suing for the inaccessible sites, include names like Mizrahi Kroub LLP, Stein Saks PLLC, Gottlieb & Associates PLLC, and others. 
    • Defendant law firms, the ones on the defense, included names like Stein & Nieporent LLP, Dentons US LLP, Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP, and others 

FCC Seeks Input on Video Conferencing Accessibility 

In 2023, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced an objective to ensure that people with disabilities are able to fully participate in video conferencing. To advance this effort, in 2024 there was another vote to enhance video conferencing applications by adopting rules that software manufacturers need to follow. 

Now, they are modifying those rules and requesting comments from the larger community. The dates are as follows: 

  • Date on which the 2024 rules will go into effect: 1/13/2025 
  • Due date for comments: 2/3/2025 
  • Due date for replies: 3/3/2025 
  • Compliance deadline for amended rules: 1/12/2027 

Interested parties may add comments through the FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System. You can read more on the official FCC announcement. 

Aside from wider landscape reports, December itself was slow on the legal front, but we do have a few cases and updates that might be of interest: 

What Else We’ve Been Reading 

Interested in More Information?