The Federal Trade Commission will require software provider accessiBe to pay $1 million to settle allegations that it misrepresented the ability of its AI-powered web accessibility tool to make any website compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for people with disabilities.
The FTC press release includes this subhead: Company also failed to disclose material connections to online reviewers
Essentially the FTC found that accessiBe had been misrepresenting itself to end users, customers, and the community. This finding may not be a surprise for many disabled people who have encountered accessiBe in the wild, as evidenced by tools and guides which have popped up to block the accessiBe overlay.
I Told You So?
Readers of this site are probably familiar with plenty of these false claims and misrepresentations because I have been tracking them since 2020 in the painfully long and stove-piped post #accessiBe Will Get You Sued.
This paragraph from the FTC release is a good summation of that post’s 23,000 words:
[D]espite the company’s claims, accessWidget did not make all user websites WCAG-compliant and these claims were therefore false, misleading, or unsubstantiated, in violation of the FTC Act. In addition, the complaint alleges that accessiBe deceptively formatted third-party articles and reviews to appear as if they were independent opinions by impartial authors and failed to disclose the company’s material connections to the supposedly objective reviewers.
Vindication?
You might think this feels like vindication, but it does not.
Sure, it’s nice to be validated by the FTC after 5 years of shouting to anyone who will listen that accessiBe is a net harm for the disability community. But the settlement is a pittance.
Reports put accessiBe’s 2024 revenue at $51.3 million. The settlement has a fine of $1 million. Subtracted from its 2024 revenue, that leaves accessiBe with $50.3 million dollars for the year. Dollars earned by lying to customers, misrepresenting itself to the community, and arguably harming disabled users.
In other words, the financial incentive to continue to be a bad actor is still there. Companies like AudioEye (projected $35.2 million in revenue), UserWay (LevelAccess), and each one listed on the Overlay Fact Sheet simply need to look at their revenues and calculate if $1 million is the cost of doing business.
Only Proposed?
This settlement is proposed. It’s not final. It will get published in the Federal Register and then will be open for 30 days for public comment. Then it goes for final approval. I am not a lawyer.
Regardless of whether it goes up on Monday or later, 30 days brings the close date well past 20 January 2025 (inauguration day). This draft FTC statement on the public comment period is the only reference I have, but will update this post when I know more. I am still not a lawyer.
The good news for those impacted by accessiBe’s history of false claims is that they can leave comments with their own experiences, opinions, demonstrable facts, and / or thoughts on the size of the fine. This will all become part of the public record for this case and available online. I continue to not be a lawyer.
But Legal Force?
This presumes the FTC will have the teeth or the will in the coming administration. That includes the will to enforce the part of the settlement where accessiBe is barred from making the claims or turfing the astro that got it into trouble.
Some good news on that front is that the two Republican FTC commissioners (Andrew N. Ferguson, who clerked for Thomas, and Melissa Holyoak) made it a point to call out accessiBe’s actions as deceptive in their own separate statement.
They also make it a point to explicitly note their support of this ruling should not be taken as them endorsing the position that the ADA, or the WCAG, require[s] a website operator to ensure that some or all of the third-party domains or subdomains with which it integrates are accessible.
This is neither good nor bad, but worth being aware of if they stay on in the new administration (and then become the most de facto moderate of commissioners as a result of the Overton shift).
Probable Win?
What this settlement does offer, however, is yet more ammo for anyone stuck fighting back against overlay products getting the green light from clients or bosses who only see overlays as risk mitigation against their own misunderstanding.
The FTC considers accessiBe to be deceptive. Anybody considering accessiBe as a vendor should know about this and, with this reasonably visible ruling, hopefully will.
After all, the prior evidence, complaints, and bad press have certainly had no impact on accessiBe’s not-quite-hockey-stick growth over the last few years.
Summary and Exhibits
I encourage you to visit the FTC Cases and Proceedings page for accessiBe Inc. You can download all the exhibits, mostly as tagged PDFs but with some videos, though I am embedding them here as well.
Exhibit I may look familiar to you. It is the video that accessiBe’s former CEO (now president) made to address my post in August 2020 (and on which I commented extensively). I have opted to embed the YouTube version of the video. The captions are the same.
Consent Agreement (257.29 KB)
Complaint (1.6 MB)
Analysis of proposed consent agreement (114.24 KB)
Joint Statement from Commissioners Ferguson and Holyoak (217.91 KB)
Related Links
There is far more content online about the failures and false claims of accessiBe and overlays in general, so consider this a curated list for those that explicitly cite accessiBe and not just all overlays broadly.
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