Accessibility overlays will not make your government website compliant
An accessibility overlay will not make an Australian government website compliant with WCAG 2.2 or the Disability Discrimination Act 1992. Vendors sell a single line of JavaScript as instant compliance. The failures that lock people out of government services are content decisions, and a script that changes how a page renders cannot make a content decision for you.
What an accessibility overlay actually does
An overlay is code that sits on top of a page and adjusts its appearance in the browser: bigger text, higher contrast, a reading mask, a screen-reader mode. It is bolted onto the surface. It does not rewrite your headings, restructure your page, describe your images, or lower your reading level. Those live in the content and the markup, not in the rendering layer an overlay controls.
The failures that matter are content decisions
Think about what actually stops someone completing a task. A link that reads "click here" tells a screen reader user nothing about where it goes. An image of a process diagram with no text alternative is invisible to them. A wall of text with no real headings cannot be navigated, and content pitched at a year 12 reading level shuts out a large share of the people the page exists to serve.
An overlay cannot fix any of these, because each one is a decision a person needed to make and did not. It can inject a generic alt attribute, but it cannot know the image is a five-step diagram whose sequence needs describing. It can add a heading tag, but it cannot decide what the heading should say.
The AHRC has now put this in writing
In April 2025 the Australian Human Rights Commission released its Guidelines on Equal Access to Digital Goods and Services, replacing the 2014 advisory note. The guidelines state plainly that relying on AI and automated fixes, including overlays, is not a substitute for inclusive design.
WCAG 2.2 Level AA is the benchmark for Australian government digital services, and the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 makes access a legal obligation, not a nice-to-have. An overlay that shows a compliance badge without meeting the standard does not lower your legal risk. It hides it.
Overlays can make access worse
This is the part the sales deck leaves out. Overlays often clash with the assistive technology people already run, so a blind user with their own screen reader can end up fighting the overlay's competing mode. Overseas, overlays have attracted legal action rather than prevented it, and disability advocates have been consistent: they do not want a widget, they want content they can use.
A false sense of compliance is more dangerous than a known gap, because it stops the real work from being funded. Once a manager believes the overlay solved accessibility, the money to fix the content quietly disappears.
What to do instead
Fix accessibility at the source. That means content design and governance, not a plugin.
Write link text that describes where the link goes.
Give every meaningful image a text alternative written by someone who understands what the image is doing.
Structure pages with real headings so they can be navigated by keyboard and screen reader.
Treat reading level as a decision made before the first sentence, not a check at the end. The Australian Government Style Manual sets the expectation for clear, plain language.
Name someone accountable for accessibility on each page, so the decisions actually get made.
In my experience, accessibility rarely fails for want of tools. It fails because no one owns the content decisions, so they default to whatever is quickest, and an overlay is marketed as the quickest option of all.
Before you buy
Ask one question before you sign an overlay contract: which of our most important user tasks currently fails for someone using a screen reader? If no one on the team can answer, the overlay is not the purchase you need. The honest next step is a content audit and a funded plan to fix what it finds.
Photo by MARIOLA GROBELSKA on Unsplash.