[NFBCS] Accessibility Overlays, what are they and can someone elaborate on them?

[David Andrews]

Brian:

Others have given you a pretty good answer to you question. I will 
add, that in general the accessibility frowns on this stuff. Some of 
the companies that market these solutions position them as an easy 
solution to accessibility so you want get sued.

The more respectable companies will say that you can use them until 
you can make permanent fixes, others would have you believe they are 
enough in and of themselves.

As your experience shows, they don't always work, and in fact may do 
more harm than good.  And ... your developers on't learn anything 
about accessibility so keep making the same mistakes.

Dave

At 02:07 AM 9/25/2020, Brian Buhrow via NFBCS wrote:
>         hello everyone.  Below is a link to a web site that behaves very
>strangely on Safari with iOS and, possibly, other browsers and operating
>systems as well.  The behavior is as follows:
>
>         the first time you open it, the site works beautifully with 
> VoiceOver.
>
>Then , the second time you open it, and every time there after, it goes
>into a mode where VoiceOver can see no links at all and it says something
>about using the website in screen reader mode.  There is nothing to click
>on and nothing to get out of that page.  Visually, the sentence about Using
>the website in screen reader mode does not appear and, if you turn off
>voiceover, you can use the web site just fine.
>
>A friend of mine suggested this might be due to something called an
>accessibility overlay, which is loaded with the page and renders the page
>useless with VoiceOver.  More confusingly, however, it seems to only get
>loaded after the page has been loaded and used once.  I assume this is due
>to the page seeing some stored cookie somewhere, but I don't actually know.
>
>         So, my questions are: what is an accessibility 
> overlay?  Who makes and
>sells them and how often are they used?
>
>         Finally, can someone talk about how they work in general terms and,
>perhaps, give an example of one that works well and is well supported?
>I've never heard of these things before and I'd like to know more about
>them and how to use them, avoide them, etc.  So, any thoughts or discussion
>would be greatly appreciated.
>
>-thanks
>-Brian


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