An honest accessiBe alternative

accessiBe is an overlay: a script you add to your site that shows a floating accessibility icon and claims to make the page compliant automatically. The trouble is that an overlay sits on top of your site without changing the underlying code, so the real problems are still there for anyone whose assistive technology does not use the widget.

Two things tend to send people looking for an alternative:

• In April 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission fined accessiBe $1 million for deceptive advertising about its AI product and for undisclosed paid reviews.
• Independent research has found that sites using overlays are over-represented in accessibility lawsuits, not protected from them. The overlay is sometimes cited as a barrier itself.

This is not an overlay and it does not touch your code. It loads your page in a real browser, runs the open-source axe-core engine against WCAG 2.2 Level A and AA, and shows every failing element with the exact success criterion and conformance level. You get a shareable report, no login, and an honest note about what automated testing can and cannot verify. It will never tell you that you are "100% compliant", because no automated tool can.

The point is the opposite of an overlay: instead of hiding the issues behind a widget, it shows them to you (or your developer) so they can be fixed properly and stay fixed.

An overlay is a runtime patch. It cannot reliably write correct alt text, fix colour contrast in your design, or label your buttons, and it adds a dependency that can break with site changes. Correcting the underlying HTML and CSS is the durable fix, and it is the one that holds up if your accessibility is ever challenged.

The workflow most teams settle on: scan, fix at the source, re-scan to confirm. The same engine here also runs as a browser extension, a CLI and GitHub Action for CI, and an MCP server, so you can keep accessibility from regressing once you have fixed it.