Shockwave Digital Compliance

Services

Four things, and the documents come first.

Most accessibility vendors sell you a website audit. Your website is one part of the obligation and usually the smaller one — a city publishes hundreds of documents a year and almost none of them are tagged.

How we test

Automated tooling catches roughly a third of the WCAG success criteria. Any vendor whose process is "we ran a scanner" is selling you a third of a job and calling it done.

We do not use accessibility overlays.

An overlay does not fix a site, it sits on top of one. It cannot restructure your headings, label your form fields, or tag a single PDF — so every document obligation under the rule is untouched by it. And when defendants have told a court an overlay resolved the problem, the court has repeatedly disagreed.

  • A federal court — ruling

    The defendant argued the case was moot because it had remediated the site using accessiBe. The court refused: "Here, Defendant has not met its ‘formidable burden’ that its actions have completely and irrevocably eradicated the effects of the alleged violations." The plaintiff’s expert found that the defendant’s "implementation of the [a]ccessiBe overlay widget . . . created new accessibility barriers." The motion to dismiss was denied in its entirety.

    Martinez v. Pure Green NYC Wholesale Corp., No. 1:23-cv-04247 (E.D.N.Y. Mar. 30, 2025) — motion to dismiss DENIED

  • A federal court — ruling

    The defendant had bought a one-year partnership with accessiBe and produced three audits concluding it met WCAG 2.1. The court still denied dismissal: the defendant "fails to meet the necessary burden to demonstrate ADA mootness," because "multiple barriers still allegedly exist."

    Quezada v. U.S. Wings, Inc., No. 1:20-cv-10707 (S.D.N.Y. Dec. 7, 2021) — motion to dismiss DENIED

  • Federal Trade Commission

    A $1,000,000 order against accessiBe, the largest overlay vendor, for claiming its widget could make any website WCAG-compliant. The FTC called those claims "false, misleading, or unsubstantiated," and the order bars the company from repeating them without evidence. It was also cited for passing off paid endorsements as independent reviews. This is a consent order, not a litigated ruling — and it is the only regulator action against an overlay vendor.

    In the Matter of accessiBe Inc., FTC File No. 222-3156 — final order April 2025

  • The National Federation of the Blind

    The largest organisation of blind Americans passed resolutions condemning overlay providers by name, including accessiBe, and stating that accessiBe "promotes the false claims of attaining [WCAG] compliance through the integration of one line of code." It also revoked the company’s convention sponsorship.

    NFB Resolutions 2021-04 and 2021-17

  • The accessibility profession

    More than a thousand accessibility practitioners have signed a public statement that "no overlay product on the market can cause a website to become fully compliant with any existing accessibility standard and therefore cannot eliminate legal risk." Signatories include accessibility staff at Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Salesforce and Shopify, and authors of the W3C accessibility specifications themselves. No overlay-vendor employee has signed it.

    Overlay Fact Sheet — 1,000+ signatories, as of August 2026

  • The numbers

    Businesses that had an accessibility overlay live on their site and were sued anyway: 933 in 2023, and 1,023 in 2024 — roughly a quarter of all digital accessibility lawsuits that year. Installing one did not prevent the claim.

    As tracked by UsableNet’s year-end ADA digital lawsuit reports (UsableNet is a commercial accessibility vendor)

To be fair about it

Courts have accepted that a website was fixed — where the owner rebuilt it properly and had it independently audited. What they have repeatedly declined to accept is an overlay offered as the fix. The distinction is the whole point: source-level remediation is defensible, and a widget over the top of it is not.

Already have one? A lot of cities do — it was sold to them as compliance, and it typically does not measure up. We will show you exactly what yours covers and where it leaves you exposed. Then we fix the source: once, properly, and you own the code. Theirs stops working the day you stop paying. Ours cannot — there is nothing to switch off.

Start with a free accessibility read.

We will run your site and a sample of your documents against the same standard the rule uses, and tell you where you actually stand. No obligation, and you keep the report either way.

Request an accessibility read