Two categories of tool dominate the accessibility software market. Overlay widgets — accessiBe, UserWay, AudioEye — inject WAI-ARIA attributes at runtime and promise instant ADA compliance for a flat monthly fee, typically **$490 to $1,490 per site per year. Real scanners — Pope Tech, Silktide, Monsido, axe-core, AccessProof — audit your actual rendered DOM and report issues you then have to fix. Real scanners cost ~10x less and ship the work back to your codebase, where it belongs. This guide is the version of the comparison we wish merchants had before signing one.**
The architectures differ at the foundation. The pitch differs at the surface.
What overlays actually do
An overlay is a JavaScript snippet you paste into your site. It loads on every page, scans the DOM at runtime, and adds ARIA attributes (role, aria-label, tabindex, etc.) to elements it detects as missing them. Most overlays also expose a sidebar widget letting the user toggle visual settings — high-contrast, larger fonts, dyslexia-friendly typeface.
That part — the visual toolbar — is benign. It mimics what the operating system already provides and what every modern browser supports natively. The disabled-user research community has been clear for years that the toolbar duplicates capabilities most users either already have or do not want.
