WCAGdesk vs accessiBe.
accessiBe is a JavaScript overlay that the US Federal Trade Commission fined $1 million in April 2025 for deceptive marketing of its accessibility claims. WCAGdesk is a continuous source-code scanner that produces RFC 3161-timestamped, hash-anchored evidence bundles for European Accessibility Act enforcement.
In April 2025 the FTC entered a $1M settlement with accessiBe over claims that its overlay made websites WCAG-compliant. The order treats those marketing assertions as deceptive. Class actions against US sites running overlay widgets have continued in parallel. Under the European Accessibility Act, the underlying liability is your source HTML — a runtime widget does not change what a German court or a French civil-society group will actually test.
Source: FTC consent order, In re accessiBe Ltd., April 2025Head to head
| Dimension | accessiBe | WCAGdesk |
|---|---|---|
| Category | JavaScript overlay widget | Continuous source scanner + evidence record |
| Touches your source HTML | No — modifies the DOM at runtime | Yes — reports on what is actually shipped |
| Engine | Proprietary "AI" overlay | axe-core 4.11 — same as Lighthouse and Chrome DevTools |
| Evidence artifact | None — overlay state is ephemeral | PDF + RFC 3161 timestamp + SHA-256 hash chain anchored to Polygon mainnet |
| Screen-reader behaviour | Widely documented to break NVDA / JAWS / VoiceOver flow | Does not modify your site — AT reads your existing markup |
| Regulator posture | $1M FTC settlement (April 2025); ongoing US class actions | Designed around EAA Art. 4 and BFSG § 12 disclosure |
| EU Abmahnung defence | Overlay output is not durable proof of what was tested when | Dated, hash-chained scan history a Fachanwalt can attach to a response |
| Pricing (entry) | From ~$49/mo per domain, contract-driven | €149/mo Audit · €299/mo Defense · €599/mo Counsel · cancel anytime |
Why overlays don't solve the EU problem
Under the European Accessibility Act and Germany's BFSG, what is being assessed is the service as provided. Source HTML rendered on the user's device is the service. A widget that runs after page load and re-decorates the DOM does not change the document the spider, the legal assistant, or the screen reader sees first — and it leaves no record of what state the site was in on any given date.
German law firms running BFSG warning-letter campaigns since August 2025 do not test with overlays enabled. They cite concrete WCAG failures on specific URLs. Defending against that letter requires showing what your site looked like at the timestamp on the screenshot — exactly the artifact overlays cannot produce.
Why "AI accessibility" marketing is a regulator's red flag now
The FTC's April 2025 order against accessiBe specifically calls out marketing claims that the product makes sites WCAG-compliant. The same posture is showing up in EU consumer-protection enforcement: French civil-society groups filed emergency injunctions against major retailers in November 2025 over accessibility misrepresentations. Stating "we are accessible because we installed an overlay" is now a thing that gets you cited, not a thing that protects you.
What WCAGdesk does instead
- Crawls a representative sample of your live URLs on a weekly (Audit) or daily (Defense / Counsel) schedule using a clearly identified user agent.
- Runs axe-core 4.11 against the rendered DOM and stores results with the engine version, ruleset, and per-URL hash.
- Issues a PDF/A-2b report carrying an RFC 3161 timestamp from a publicly trusted TSA. Each weekly batch is rolled into a SHA-256 Merkle tree and anchored on Polygon mainnet — anyone can recompute the root.
- Generates an EAA Article 4 accessibility statement in EN and DE, prefilled
with your actual scan numbers, ready to publish at
/accessibility. - If an Abmahnung arrives, the Defense view assembles the response packet: dated scan history, remediation log, German-language draft for a Fachanwalt für IT-Recht to review.
Honest disclosures
- WCAGdesk is automated. axe-core catches roughly 30–40% of WCAG criteria — the ceiling for any automated tool, per Deque's own published research. For full BFSG conformance you also want manual expert review. See our methodology page for the long version.
- Until Q3 2026 our RFC 3161 timestamps come from FreeTSA (publicly trusted, not a qualified TSA under eIDAS Art. 41). Qualified TSA via Sectigo and AdES PDF sealing are on the roadmap.
- We are not lawyers. The evidence WCAGdesk produces supports a legal defence; a Fachanwalt runs the actual defence.
When accessiBe might still make sense
If you genuinely cannot touch your front-end code, do not ship in the EU, and want a quick contrast-toggle for users — an overlay is a UX feature. It is not, and the FTC has now formally said it is not, a compliance product. Pair it with a real audit trail. Don't rely on it for evidence.
See your own site through a real scanner first.
One free scan, no signup, axe-core 4.11. You'll see exactly what an EU enforcement letter would cite — before you pay anyone, including us.