Patrick Perdue, a radio enthusiast who is blind, regularly purchased equipment through the Ham Radio Outlet website. The website code allowed you to easily move through the sections of each page with your keyboard, your screen reader speaking the text.
That all changed when the store started using an automated accessibility tool, often called an accessibility overlay, created 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 the original coding errors and add more accessible features. But he reformatted the page and some widgets, like the checkout and shopping cart buttons, were hidden from Mr. Perdue’s screen reader. The labels for images and buttons were encoded incorrectly. He could no longer find the site’s search box or the headings he needed to navigate each section of the page, he said.
Mr. Perdue is one of hundreds of people with disabilities who have complained about problems with automated accessibility web services, whose popularity has risen sharply in recent years due to advances in AI and new legal pressures on web services. companies to make their websites accessible.
More than a dozen companies offer these tools. Two of the biggest AudioEye Y user mode, are publicly traded and reported revenue in the millions in recent financial statements. Some charge monthly fees ranging from around $50 to about $1,000, depending on their websites, while others charge annual fees in the range of several hundred to several thousand dollars. (Pricing is usually presented in tiers and depends on the number of pages a site has.) These companies list major corporations like Hulu, eBay, and Uniqlo, as well as hospitals and local governments, among their clients.
In his speech, he often claims that his services will not only help people who are blind or have low vision to use the Internet more easily, but will also prevent companies from facing the litigation that can arise if they do not make their sites accessible. .
But it’s not working that way. Users like Mr Perdue say the software offers little help, and some of the customers who use AudioEye, accessiBe and UserWay face 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 still haven’t found a single one that makes my life better,” said Mr. Perdue, 38, who lives in Queens. He added: “I spend more time working on these overlays than I do browsing 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 overstated” 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 help them while online.
AudioEye, UserWay and accessiBe said they share the goal of making websites more accessible, acknowledging to some extent that their products are not perfect. Lionel Wolberger, UserWay’s chief operating officer, said the company has apologized for problems with its tools and has worked to fix them, pledging to do the same for anyone else who points out problems. AccessiBe declined to answer questions about specific criticism of its product, but Josh Basile, a company spokesman, criticized the open letter against overlays, saying he was “pushing the conversation in the wrong direction.” However, he added that the company was willing to learn from the comments.
All three companies said their products would improve over time, with both AudioEye and UserWay saying they were investing in research and development to improve AI capabilities.
AudioEye CEO David Moradi said his automated service and others like it were the only way to fix the Internet’s millions of active websites, the vast majority of which are not accessible to people who are blind or have low vision. “Automation has to come into play. Otherwise we are never going to fix this problem, and this is a huge problem,” he said.
However, accessibility experts would prefer that companies do not use automated accessibility overlays. Ideally, they say, organizations would hire and train full-time employees to oversee these efforts. But doing so can be difficult.
“There is absolutely a call for people with accessibility backgrounds, and jobs are available,” said Adrian Roselli, who has worked as a digital accessibility consultant for two decades. “The skills aren’t there yet to match because it’s been a niche industry for so long.”
This gap, he said, has given companies selling automated accessibility tools an opportunity to proliferate, offering websites seemingly quick fixes to their accessibility problems and sometimes making it harder for blind people to navigate the web.
On the accessiBe website, for example, the company claims that in “up to 48 hours” after its JavaScript code is installed, a customer’s page will be “accessible and compliant” with the Americans with Disabilities Act, which the Department of Justice made it clear in recent guide applied to all online goods and services offered by companies and public organizations.
AudioEye’s Mr. Moradi says the company advises its customers to use, in addition to an automated tool, accessibility experts to manually fix any errors. But AudioEye has no control over whether customers follow its advice, he said. He advocates a hybrid solution that combines automation and manual fixes, and says he expects automation capabilities to gradually improve.
“We try to be very transparent about it and say, ‘Automation will do a lot, but it won’t do everything. It’s going to get better and better over time,’” he said.
Blind and low vision people say it is unreasonable to ask them to wait for automated products to improve when the use of websites is increasingly necessary for everyday tasks. Common problems, such as buttons and images that aren’t labeled despite the use of an overlay, can prevent Brian Moore, 55, who is blind and lives in Toronto, from ordering a pizza, he said.
In addition to mislabeled images, buttons, and forms, blind users have documented problems with overlays that include not being able to use their keyboards to navigate web pages because page headers aren’t marked up correctly or because certain parts of the page can’t be accessed. Search. or selectable. Other times, automated tools have turned every bit of text on a page into a header, preventing users from easily jumping to the section of a website they want to read.
Mr. Moore said he had had trouble completing tasks such as buying a laptop, claiming his employee benefits, booking transportation, and completing banking transactions on websites that had overlays.
“If the goal is to make it more accessible and you can’t fix the basic problems, what value are you adding?” he said.
Accessibility issues can also make it difficult for people to do their jobs. LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, a nonprofit education and advocacy organization in San Francisco, recently sued the human resources software company Automatic data processing, which had been using an automated accessibility tool from AudioEye. Despite the overlap, there were “many, many instances where blind employees were unable to do their jobs,” said Bryan Bashin, the organization’s executive director. The claim was resolved through a agreement in which ADP agreed to improve its accessibility and not rely solely on overlays.
ADP did not respond to questions about the lawsuit, but said it “highly values digital inclusion.”
“We’re in a Wild West state right now,” Bashin said, referring to the assortment of accessibility software, the quality of which he said could vary widely.
Still, he said that LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired was not against such tools. She could envision a future where automated software would dramatically improve online experiences for blind people; that is not the reality right now.
“I think AI will do 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 one right now.”