Honest comparison
uniqu vs accessibility overlays
Both put a button on your website. That's where the similarity ends.
| AI overlay products | uniqu | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Subscription — $400–$600 per year, forever | Pay once, use forever (LTD) |
| Mechanism | JavaScript overlay layered on top of your site | Real axe-core scans + CMS-specific fixes |
| Honesty about claims | Marketed as "AI compliance" or "automatic ADA conformance" | We don't claim to make your site legally compliant |
| Lawsuit posture | Overlay vendors and their customers have been targets of disability-rights lawsuits | No overlay; no compliance claim; honest scan tool |
| Fix instructions | No — the overlay tries to mask issues at runtime | Yes — step-by-step in your CMS (WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, Webflow) |
| Visitor preferences | Reset per session in most cases | Persist per-visitor via localStorage |
| Open-source engine | No, proprietary | Yes, axe-core (industry standard) |
| Source code | Closed | Widget bundle is reviewable; we plan to MIT-license it |
Why the difference matters
AI accessibility overlays became a category in the late 2010s with a simple promise: paste one line of JavaScript, and the script will "fix" accessibility on your site automatically. In practice, screen-reader users widely report that overlays make their experience worse, not better. The underlying HTML stays inaccessible; the overlay just papers over it at runtime.
Courts have generally not accepted overlay installation as a defense to accessibility lawsuits, and overlay vendors themselves — along with their customers — have been the subject of high-profile disability-rights complaints.
uniqu takes the opposite approach. We run the same open-source rule engine government auditors use (axe-core, maintained by Deque Systems), then tell you in plain English exactly where to click in your CMS to fix each issue. Real fixes, not cosmetics.
The economics
Most overlay products charge $400–$600 per site per year, recurring. uniqu charges once. We can do this because the entire stack runs on Cloudflare's edge — global delivery is included, not metered. Our marginal cost per customer rounds to "the price of a coffee." Yours rounds to "$0 every year after the first."
Our honesty pledge
We will never tell you uniqu makes your site "legally compliant." Only your code, reviewed by a real human, can do that. What we will do: find every WCAG issue, tell you exactly what's wrong, and show you how to fix it.
Read the full honesty pledge →