Accessibility Widgets Won't Protect Your Next Renewal
If your product isn't accessible, a widget won't save your next renewal. Here's what will.
A Renewal at Risk
Imagine this: your curriculum platform has been in districts for two years. Educators use it regularly, renewal conversations have been routine, and your team has put real effort into making the product work for a range of learners. Then a district declines to renew: not because of the content, not because of the pricing, but because your product doesn't meet federal accessibility requirements. The districts you serve are already scrutinizing accessibility, and that pressure will only grow as public institutions face an ADA-mandated compliance deadline next month.
Why Accessibility Widgets Don't Work
It's a situation we encounter regularly. During an accessibility review, we find that a client was using an overlay widget: a third-party tool that promises to detect and correct accessibility issues automatically, often with a single line of code.
It's an appealing solution. It's also one that consistently falls short.
Automated tools, even sophisticated ones, can only detect a fraction of issues covered by the legal standard: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Version 2.1 at level AA . The majority require human evaluation: someone who understands how a screen reader actually moves through a page, how a keyboard user navigates a form, or how a student who relies on assistive technology experiences your product's core workflows. No widget can replicate that.
According to UsableNet's 2025 Midyear Digital Accessibility Lawsuit Report, 456 businesses were sued in the first half of 2025 alone despite having accessibility widgets in place, representing more than 22% of all digital accessibility cases filed in that period, with the full year projected to reach nearly 5,000 total lawsuits. Overlays also interfere with users' existing assistive technology. People with disabilities typically have their own tools configured precisely to their needs. An overlay that forces those users to learn a new toolbar for every site they visit isn't an accommodation; it's a barrier.
The widget didn't solve the problem. It delayed it.
What a Real Evaluation Uncovers
In our experience, most products struggle in the same four areas, and those are where we focus on most in our evaluations.
- Keyboard and screen reader navigation. A product's heading hierarchy and landmark structure determine how these tools interpret and move through content. We evaluate whether your product can be navigated entirely by keyboard and whether its underlying structure gives screen readers a logical, meaningful path.
- Forms and labels. Unlabeled fields, unclear error messages, and inaccessible form controls are among the most common barriers we find. For an edtech product, this is especially consequential: assessments, feedback forms, and registration flows are often crucial in the classroom.
- Image tagging and video captioning. Every image that conveys meaning needs a meaningful description. Every video needs captions. This applies to downloadable content too, including Word documents and PDFs.
- Legibility. Color contrast ratios, text resizing, and the ability to resize text without breaking the page layout aren't aesthetic details. For many learners, they determine whether the content is usable at all.
Typically, our evaluation surfaces issues in all four areas. But the most important finding often has nothing to do with accessibility compliance.
The Deeper Issue: UDL Was Never Part of the Design
Here’s a summary from a recent experience with a client: As we worked through the accessibility evaluation, a pattern emerged. The product's accessibility gaps weren't isolated oversights. They were symptoms of a more fundamental problem: Universal Design for Learning (UDL) had never been part of the design process.
UDL is a research-based framework for building learning experiences that work for the widest possible range of learners from the start, not as an accommodation added later, but as a foundation. When it's absent, accessibility gaps aren't random. They're structural.
In this client's curriculum platform, one example stood out. Key instructional content lacked alternative representations, offering learners no meaningful options for how they could access or engage with the material. For learners using screen readers, the experience was disorienting. For learners with cognitive or language processing differences, it was exclusionary. For many general education students, it was simply harder to use than it needed to be.
One gap in UDL. Multiple accessibility criteria affected. And once addressed, the screen reader experience improved, cognitive load decreased, and the content became more navigable for everyone.
That's what designing with inclusion in mind actually looks like, and why the decisions made early on in the design of a product carry so much weight.
More Than an Evaluation, More Than a Fix
Wherever you are in your product's lifecycle, we can address this. We can work with your team during early planning to design for UDL and build accessibility into your product from the start. We can conduct evaluations and provide guidance mid-development. And, we can help you after a compliance gap surfaces in a renewal conversation with a large customer.
We can work directly with your leadership or engineering teams, providing clear documentation and instructionally grounded guidance on specific accessibility and UDL principles. Our guidance is tailored to grow your team's understanding, not just add to their to-do list.
We prioritize remediation systematically, working toward full WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance (the federal standard now required for publicly-funded institutions) starting with the issues that affect the most users first.
The outcome isn't just a more compliant product. It's enabling your team to be better equipped to make accessibility-informed decisions from that point forward.
Accessibility done right isn't a compliance checkbox. It's a commitment to building products that work for all learners and educators, from the first design decision to the last remediation. Accessibility gaps don't wait for a convenient time to surface. The sooner you know where your product stands, the better positioned you are to improve the learning experience and protect renewals. Schedule a free 30-minute consultation with us today.