WordPress have done the right thing in taking these fake reviews down, and Dave, you don’t have to apologise for what you said. Dolson didn’t base his concerns on the spelling, he used more revealing factors to work out how genuine the reviews were.

Overlays that claim to give you ADA compliance at the touch of a button are a scam, so it is not surprising that some might resort to scam reviews to bolster sales. Unfortunately, when people don’t understand something because it is too technical, they are only too willing to believe it when someone comes along saying “I will put it right for you, dead cheap!” People don’t ask for proof. Let the buyer beware.

You might think I am biased against overlays because I am in the accessibility industry, selling accessibility audit services all the time. But it is easy to work out the truth about overlays.

One of the best known, and more important, aims of an accessible website is to ensure blind people are given an “alt text” description of what shows in each image. An overlay can tell you when there is no alt text, but it cannot tell you if the words in an alt text correctly tell you what information an image shows, which is the important thing. If the image is of a horse, but the alt text says it’s a cow, there is no way an overlay can pick that up. It will be many years before image recognition gets to the level of providing detailed descriptions of image content sufficient to inform blind people.

Again, if a link or button on the website excludes keyboard users and blind people because it has been marked up as div or span elements (a very common defect), overlay tools can’t tell you that either.

However, a word of warning here. All the accessibility overlay makers have one thing in common – they require the website using them to display an accessibility icon on their home page.

Those attorneys in the US, who target websites that don’t comply with the law, have recently cottoned on to the fact that the icons are a very public admission that the website owner has NOT made any effort to make their website comply with the law, or accessible to disabled people. They are beginning to zero in on those websites, do a few quick tests of their own to confirm the lack of accessibility, and sue them. Displaying one of those icons is like waving a red flag to a bull. It says “Come and sue me!”