Websites on .us Domains Use Accessibility Overlays 18 Times as Often as German Sites

Accessibility overlays get a lot of attention, from advertising to lawsuits to open letters from disability advocates. An overlay is a script added to a website that places an accessibility toolbar on every page, with options such as bigger text or a high-contrast mode, and tries to adjust the page for visitors with disabilities after it loads.

For a business owner deciding whether to buy one, it helps to know how common they really are and who uses them. Adoption shows where the market is being sold and which products dominate it, and it answers a simple question: is an overlay something most websites have?

It is not. About 263,000 homepages run an overlay, 1.7% of the web. The US is the exception: 5.5% of websites on .us domains use one, about 18 times the rate of German websites. That lines up with US legal pressure under the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act. Our companion study looks at how overlay sites score on automated tests.

We used the September 2026 HTTP Archive, a public dataset that tests millions of websites every month and records the technologies installed on each homepage. We checked all 15,470,478 homepages it tested for an accessibility overlay or toolbar, a product that shows visitors an accessibility widget, and broke the total down by product.

We then grouped homepages two more ways. By domain ending, where .us is the United States' country ending and .de is Germany's, and by popularity using Google's Chrome UX Report, from the 10,000 most visited websites to websites outside the top million, where most small business websites sit.

That is about 263,000 homepages out of 15.5 million. For all the debate around them, overlays remain a small minority choice: 98 homepages in 100 have no overlay at all, whether they fixed accessibility in the site itself or have not addressed it.

Most overlay homepages sit outside the top million websites, but that is mainly because that group holds about 95% of all homepages. Measured as a rate, websites outside the top million use overlays at 1.7%, the same as the web as a whole.

UserWay has nearly twice the installs of the next product. AudioEye and accessiBe are close to each other, at about 52,000 to 54,000 homepages each. One Click Accessibility, a free WordPress plugin, is fourth with 35,609. After the top four, installs drop fast: no other product reaches 10,000 homepages.

The free plugin in fourth place shows how easy adding a toolbar has become: a WordPress site owner can install one in minutes at no cost. Paid products lead the table, but a free option alone accounts for more than a third as many homepages as the market leader.

Websites on .us domains run overlays at 5.5%, more than three times the 1.7% rate across the web and about 18 times the 0.31% of German .de websites. That lines up with legal pressure in the US, where the ADA is applied to business websites. German websites rarely run an overlay at all.

Popularity pulls the other way. 0.9% of the 10,000 most visited websites use an overlay, about half the rate of websites outside the top million. One likely reason is that large organizations have in-house developers who fix problems in the site's own code, and rely less on a third-party widget.

If you are being pitched an overlay, know that 98 in 100 websites run without one. Ask what the tool changes in your actual pages, then test the result yourself with Google's free Lighthouse test in Chrome, with the widget switched on.

If you already have one, it is not a reason to skip fixing the site itself. Darker text colors, labels on form fields, descriptions on images and link text that says where it goes help every visitor, whether or not the widget loads. A website accessibility consultant can find those problems page by page and fix them at the source.

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