Why we built AccessiFlow
April 22, 2026 · 5 min read · Shiva Tahal
Accessibility overlays have a rough reputation. Several vendors have been sued for claiming an overlay alone makes your site ADA-compliant. They do not. So why build another one?
The problem an overlay actually solves
Most sites that need accessibility improvements aren’t going to get rebuilt next week. A typical content site — restaurants, clinics, government departments, small SaaS tools — is under-resourced, stitched together from WordPress themes or old React, and gets one major update per year if that.
In the meantime, a visitor with low vision still needs the text bigger. A visitor with dyslexia still reads better with OpenDyslexic. Someone with motion sensitivity needs the parallax hero to stop. These are all personal preferences that the visitor, if offered the choice, can set for themselves.
That is what an overlay can legitimately do. Not “make your site compliant” — compliance is a property of your whole codebase and content, audited by humans — but give the visitor controls that remove friction the base stylesheet left in place.
Rules we set ourselves
The hostile reviews of overlays mostly point at vendors who oversold. So we wrote down a short list of rules before touching code:
- Never claim ADA / WCAG compliance. The compliance page says plainly: the widget is an aid, not a substitute. If a customer wants compliance, they need a real audit.
- Never break a host site. The panel lives in a closed shadow DOM. Host CSS can’t reach it. Our CSS can’t leak into the host. We test against Bootstrap, Tailwind, and a deliberately hostile fixture on every release.
- No third-party trackers in the widget. Zero. Not even ours. Feature toggles send one anonymised beacon, session id hashed before it leaves the device.
- Stay small. Under 25 KB gzipped over the wire. We are at 10 KB today.
- Make it cancellable. One click in the dashboard removes the widget immediately, another deletes your data within 30 days.
What we are not doing
We are not doing “AI auto-fixing” of your pages — the marketing promise that got the original overlay vendors into trouble. The widget only applies changes the visitor explicitly asks for. It does not decide for them.
Try it honestly
If you want to see what we mean, the widget is already on this page — click the launcher in the corner. Then go read the compliance page and decide whether that honesty is what you want from your accessibility vendor.