If your restaurant's website has accessibility problems, someone has probably pitched you an overlay: paste one line of JavaScript, get a little toolbar icon in the corner, and you're "compliant."
It doesn't work like that. Here's why.
An overlay runs after the damage
A screen reader reads your page's actual HTML — the headings, the links, the form fields. An overlay is a script that loads afterward and tries to patch things on the fly. But the guest's assistive technology often meets the broken page first, and many overlay "fixes" never reach the underlying code at all. The foundation is still broken; there's just a widget standing in front of it.
Some things can't be patched from outside
Your menu is a PDF. Your reservation form has no labels. Your dish photos have no alt text. An overlay can't write a meaningful description for a photo it's never seen, can't turn a scanned menu into real text, and can't explain a booking form's errors in words. Those fixes have to happen in the site itself — which is exactly the work the overlay was sold to avoid.
It can make things worse
Guests who actually use screen readers report overlays hijacking keyboard navigation, trapping focus, and breaking commands that worked fine before. The tool meant to help ends up as one more obstacle — and courts have treated "we installed a widget" as no defense at all. Overlay products themselves have been named in accessibility lawsuits.
The actual fix
Accessibility at the source: a menu that's real text, photos with real alt text, forms with labels and clear error messages, contrast that meets the 4.5:1 ratio, everything keyboard-navigable. Built in from the start, tested, and kept up as the site changes.
That's what Remi does — every site is built to WCAG 2.2 AA, no widget required. (Our optional toolbar is a comfort layer on top of a site that already works — every toggle defaults off, and the site doesn't need it.)
We wrote a longer breakdown with a side-by-side comparison: why overlays don't work, and what's different about our approach.