I used Accessibe on a client’s website, after he was sued by a CA lawyer. We both became aware of the ADA compliance laws due to the lawsuit.

In truth, the nature this client’s business precludes 99.99% of sight-impaired persons to ever be interested in what his store sells, and he had never seen a single sight-impaired person cross the threshold of his store in 20 years of business. That lawsuit was jarring, especially in CA where the federal requirements are doubled up with a CA reg that increases the damages plaintiffs can claim.

But we got acquainted with the law, and understood that even if a sight-impaired person is not likely to be ever interested in what you sell, we have a moral duty to make what we offer accessible to her/him.

AccessiBe offers a great solution to improve the ADA compliance of a site, sufficiently so that shyster lawyers leave you alone, and sight-impaired persons can access the data. For the cost of the plugin, there is no way you could get your site compliant to that level. We tried… And we quickly abandoned that ship.

In terms of score penalty in Page Speed Insights, the plugin can be installed in the footer of the site, so the penalty is not really relevant. If your site performs at a high level everywhere else, the .js file won’t cause such a slowdown that your PSI score changes noticeably or that your UX is affected. Not even remotely close.

Now, I don’t know why AccessiBe would take the step to have people write fake reviews. It is an ill-advised decision: it would be simpler to ask users on a regular basis to review and rate the plugin. If the number of users is as high as Talia states it in her reply to this thread, that should be enough firepower to push this plugin in the stratosphere of ADA compliance.