Patrick Perdue, a blind radio enthusiast, shopped regularly for equipment through the Ham Radio Outlet website. The website’s code made it easy for him to scroll through the sections of each page with his keyboard while his screen reader spoke the text.
That all changed when the store started using an automated accessibility tool, often called an accessibility overlay, made and sold by the company accessiBe. Suddenly the site became too difficult for Mr. Perdue to navigate. The accessiBe overlay introduced code that was supposed to fix original coding errors and add more accessible features. But it reformatted the page, and some widgets — like the checkout and shopping cart buttons — were hidden from Mr. Perdue’s screen reader. Labels for images and buttons are coded incorrectly. He couldn’t find the site’s search box or the headers he needed to navigate each section of the page, he said.
Perdue is one of hundreds of people with disabilities who have complained about issues with automated accessibility web services, whose popularity has soared in recent years due to advances in AI and new legal pressure on companies to make their websites accessible.
More than a dozen companies offer these tools. Two of the largest, AudioEye and UserWay, are publicly traded and have reported millions of dollars in revenue in recent financial statements. Some charge monthly fees ranging from about $50 to about $1,000, according to their websites, while others charge annual fees in the range of several hundred or thousands of dollars. (Prices are usually listed in tiers and depend on how many pages a site has.) These companies list major companies such as Hulu, eBay, and Uniqlo, as well as hospitals and local governments, among their customers.
Often built into their pitch is a reassurance that their services not only help people who are blind or partially sighted to use the internet more easily, but also prevent companies from dealing with lawsuits that could arise if they make their sites inaccessible.
But that’s not how it goes. Users like Mr. Perdue say the software is of little help, and some of the customers using AudioEye, accessiBe and UserWay are facing legal action anyway. Last year, more than 400 companies with an accessibility widget or overlay on their website were sued for accessibility, according to data collected by a digital accessibility provider.
“I haven’t found one yet that makes my life better,” said Mr Perdue, 38, who lives in Queens. He added, “I spend more time working around these overlays than navigating the website.”
Last year, more than 700 accessibility advocates and web developers signed an open letter calling on organizations to stop using these tools, writing that the practical value of the new features was “largely exaggerated” and that the “overlays themselves may have accessibility issues”. The letter also noted that, like Mr. Perdue, many blind users already had screen readers or other software to assist them while online.
AudioEye, UserWay and accessiBe said they shared the goal of making websites more accessible, recognizing to some extent that their products aren’t perfect. Lionel Wolberger, UserWay’s chief operating officer, said the company had apologized for the issues with its tools and worked to fix them, and promised to do the same for anyone who points out issues. AccessiBe declined to answer questions about specific criticisms of its product, but Josh Basile, a company spokesperson, criticized the open letter against overlays, saying it “pushed the conversation in the wrong direction.” However, he added that the company was willing to learn from feedback.
All three companies said their products would get better over time, and both AudioEye and UserWay said they were investing in research and development to improve the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
David Moradi, AudioEye’s chief executive, said its automated service and other similar services were the only way to fix the Internet’s millions of active websites — the vast majority of which are inaccessible to people who are blind or partially sighted. “Automation has to play a role. Otherwise we will never solve this problem, and this is a huge problem,” he said.
However, accessibility experts would prefer companies not to use automated accessibility overlays. Ideally, they believe organizations would hire and train full-time employees to oversee these efforts. But it can be difficult to do this.
“There is an absolute need for people with accessibility experience, and the jobs are there,” said Adrian Roselli, who has worked as a digital accessibility consultant for two decades. “The skills are not there to match because it’s been such a niche industry for so long.”
This gap, he said, has given the companies selling automated accessibility tools a chance to proliferate, offering websites that offer seemingly quick solutions to their accessibility problems, while sometimes making it more difficult for blind people to navigate the Internet.
For example, on accessiBe’s website, the company claims that within “up to 48 hours” of JavaScript code being installed, a customer’s page “will be accessible and compliant” with the American With Disabilities Act, which the Department of Justice clearly states. has made recent guidelines applied to all online goods and services offered by public companies and organizations.
Mr Moradi of AudioEye says the company advises its customers to use accessibility experts to manually fix any errors in addition to an automated tool. But AudioEye has no control over whether customers follow his advice, he said. He advocates a hybrid solution that combines automation and manual repairs, and says he expects automation capabilities to gradually improve.
“We try to be very transparent about this and say, ‘Automation will do a lot, but not everything. It will get better and better over time,” he said.
Blind and partially sighted people say it is unreasonable to ask them to wait for automated products to get better, as the use of websites is increasingly necessary for everyday tasks. Common problems, such as buttons and graphics that aren’t labeled despite using an overlay, can keep Brian Moore, 55, who is blind and lives in Toronto, from ordering a pizza, he said.
In addition to poorly labeled images, buttons, and forms, blind users have documented issues with overlays, including not being able to use their keyboards to navigate web pages, either because headings on the page aren’t marked correctly or certain parts of the page aren’t searchable. are or selectable. Other times, automated tools have turned every bit of text on a page into a headline, making it difficult for users to jump to the section of a website they want to read.
Mr Moore said he’d had trouble completing tasks such as buying a laptop, claiming his employee benefits, booking transportation and completing banking transactions on overlayed websites.
“If the goal is to make it more accessible and you can’t solve the basic problems, what value are you adding?” he said.
Accessibility issues can also make it challenging for people to do their jobs. LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, a nonprofit advocacy and education organization based in San Francisco, recently sued workforce software company Automatic Data Processing, which had used an automated accessibility tool from AudioEye. Despite the overlay, there were “many, many instances where blind employees couldn’t do their jobs,” said Bryan Bashin, the organization’s CEO. The lawsuit was settled through a deal in which ADP agreed to improve accessibility and not rely solely on overlays.
ADP did not respond to questions about the lawsuit, but said it “greatly values digital inclusion”.
“We’re now in a Wild West state,” said Mr. Bashin, referring to the range of accessibility software that he said can vary widely in quality.
Still, he said LightHouse was not against these kinds of tools for the blind and partially sighted. He could envision a future where automated software would dramatically improve the online experiences for the blind – just not the reality right now.
“I think AI will do this well, even if it’s a mixed bag right now — just like AI will eventually give us autonomous vehicles,” he said. “But if you’ve noticed, I’m not driving it now.”
