Are sticking plasters a rip-off?

Hold on to your lunch.

When I was a kid, perhaps 7 years old, I remember running home to my mum and telling her that my brother had broken his arm falling off the slide in our local park. "I'm sure he's alright," she said. I should pause here for a minute to point out that my mum was a nurse with plenty of experience and many more years in the profession ahead of her. "I think he has," I said, tugging at her sleeve to follow me.

At that moment, my younger brother came around the corner sobbing his eyes out. I can still see him now, a wet and red face, gingerly holding his right arm which appeared to have developed a second 45 degree elbow a few inches above his wrist.?"Oh," mum said, "so he has." I can't remember what happened next but we have a few fading family photos of my brother in his school holiday shorts looking decidedly sorry for himself, holding his arm across his chest in a bright, white, unblemished sling.

And therein lies the point in my gruesome little opening tale. They fixed it, whoever "they" were. Hospital staff presumably. No one told me. My brother came home with a hard white cast that I could write my name on and other big brother type insults which were carefully designed to teach him not to look cooler than me and get all the sympathy. Carry that around on your arm! But, after a few weeks/months/years, it seemed like forever, he didn't have to anymore because "they" removed it for him. All that was left was a damp looking, skinny, pale forearm that appeared to have been grafted on from a Victorian corpse, but there was no more broken bones. Hoorah!

But what if my mum didn't do whatever she did, and "they" didn't do whatever "they" did? What if someone took a look and persuaded everyone that all that was needed was a sticking plaster, a Band Aid? The arm would still be broken but the surface of his skin would recover from it's grazing and bruises. Ignore that second elbow and it looks great from the outside.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is, in effect, what you get from an accessibility overlay. (You see, I got there in the end) Overlays are sold as pieces of JavaScript code that sit between your website and the browser, or they can be plugins, assistive toolbars, or widgets. No matter their guise, they are essentially sticking plasters you can lay across a broken website to feel better about your accessibility. I have genuinely lost count of the number of times I've contacted a business about their inaccessible website only for them to reply, "Thank you but it's okay, we have just bought [insert overlay here]"

Have you ever heard of the Ikea Effect? It's a legitimate thing. A cognitive bias. It refers to the value we place on something that we have invested our energy in to build or assemble ourselves, versus the actual value of the thing in question. Many people suffer from the Ikea Effect after they've been seduced by the quick fix, low cost promises of an overlay. It's not easy to go back, wringing your cap in your hands and twisting on your feet in front of the Finance Director and say, "You know that accessibility tool I said we should buy for the website? Well, now I need more money to fix all the things it can't do." And it's not their fault either. If you're not an expert and you meet a person who is and they tell you this is the way to go, that's the way you're going to go.

Some overlay companies offer useful functionality, like language translation, or the ability to change the colours of a site to suit the users own specific needs, but most of the benefits they offer are superfluous if the underlying website is accessible in the first place. You will struggle to find an overlay provider who promises to make you compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1AA, widely recognised in legislation as the minimum standard of true accessibility, simply because their overlay can't. Let me ask you, would you spend money on a new car if the seller said it nearly had an MOT certificate?

Speaking of cars, picture this if you can. There you are, gloved hands gripped tightly on the shirt button of a steering wheel. You're hurtling along at impossible speed. Flicking up and down though the paddle gears, brake, accelerate, the yeeeown of the engine, the pit lane constantly jabbering information through the headphones built in to in your helmet. The world passes by in a blur, but then, suddenly, you're flagged down and asked to get out, leave your vehicle and climb into a tractor which trundles and bumps you through the next laborious snail of a lap, before you get the signal to run back, get inside your car and rejoin the race. What a nightmare! But this is what it's like for disabled people who are using their own preferred assistive technology to navigate the web and then bang into your overlay, which overrides their preferences and insists on using its own. No website is an island.

If you are a small company on a limited budget, or if you are looking for a temporary solution while you build a new site, or address the accessibility of your existing site, then overlays are great. But they are not - I said they are not - long term accessibility solutions. They are a sticking plaster. Please, please, please, remember that.