Disinformation and Misinformation

When claims about accessibility are false or misleading -- and the people who cannot use the product must labor to be believed.

What It Is

Disinformation and misinformation are disabling forces. They occur when false or misleading claims about accessibility enter the spaces where decisions are made: procurement offices, design reviews, investor pitches, marketing copy, news coverage, and vendor contracts. The claims displace access.

The two forces are related but distinct.

Disinformation is deliberate. A company fabricates third-party reviews to make its product appear independently validated. A vendor files a VPAT claiming conformance with standards it knows the product does not meet. A marketing team publishes a badge that says "accessible" on a site that is not. The intent is to deceive. The FTC's $1 million enforcement action against accessiBe in 2025 was the first major federal case against accessibility disinformation: the agency found that accessiBe "deceptively formatted third-party articles and reviews to appear as if they were independent opinions by impartial authors" and falsely claimed its AI overlay could make websites fully WCAG-compliant within 48 hours.¹

Misinformation is structural. A startup genuinely believes its AI detects accessibility violations that free tools miss. A procurement officer accepts a vendor's self-reported VPAT without verification. An automated scanner reports a 100/100 accessibility score and the team concludes the site is accessible, when automated tools catch at most 30-40% of real WCAG issues.² A journalist profiles an accessibility company without consulting disabled users or comparing the product to free alternatives. No one intends to deceive. The system produces inaccuracy because no one in the chain has the knowledge, incentive, or power to check.

The distinction matters for assigning intent. It does not matter for the disabled person who cannot use the website. A screen reader user blocked by an inaccessible checkout form does not experience the vendor's intent. They experience the barrier. Whether the vendor lied or believed its own marketing, the form does not work.

Both forces disable by inserting false information between the builder and the barrier. When a builder believes accessibility has been achieved, they stop working on it. When a procurement officer believes a VPAT, they deploy an inaccessible product to thousands of users. When a journalist celebrates an accessibility startup without noting that free tools do the same work, the public narrative shifts from "accessibility requires sustained builder-side care" to "accessibility has been solved." The false claim becomes a permission structure for neglect.

A biosocial perspective

Disinformation and misinformation harm bodies, reshape behavior, and emerge from systems that reward compliance artifacts over lived experience. This page uses a biosocial lens to describe how false claims about accessibility constitute structural harm.

This page is a contribution to social medicine. It maps how false and misleading accessibility claims divert resources, normalize neglect, erode trust, impose labor on disabled people, and sustain the conditions that make inaccessibility persist.

Why It Happens

Disinformation and misinformation thrive in the accessibility space because the systems meant to verify accessibility are weak, the people affected by inaccessibility are excluded from verification, and the incentives reward claims over evidence.

Self-reporting replaces verification. The accessibility compliance ecosystem runs on trust. VPATs (Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates) are self-reported documents with no official review or certification process. A government procurement office requires a VPAT but does not have the resources to verify every claim. Beth DeConinck has documented how vendor-provided VPATs routinely "offer an incomplete picture of their product."³ The GSA's FY24 Section 508 Assessment found that 53% of federal agencies that procure ICT did not always verify that procured products met accessibility requirements.⁴ When the verification step is missing, false claims enter procurement pipelines unchallenged.

Automated scores create false confidence. Automated accessibility tools catch at most 30-40% of WCAG issues. Nine WCAG Level A/AA success criteria cannot be tested automatically at all, and another thirteen require human verification after automated detection.² Yet organizations treat automated scores as definitive. A 100/100 Lighthouse accessibility score does not mean a site is accessible. It means the site passes the automated checks that Lighthouse runs. Keyboard navigation, screen reader compatibility, logical reading order, and meaningful alternative text all require human judgment that no automated tool provides.⁵ When a team sees a high score and concludes the work is done, the score has produced misinformation.

Technoableism frames disability as a problem technology solves. Ashley Shew defines technoableism as the belief that technology is inherently good for disabled people and should be pursued regardless of whether disabled people want it.⁶ This belief converts every accessibility gap into a product opportunity and every product claim into a hopeful narrative. When a startup says "AI-powered accessibility," the technoableist frame accepts the claim without asking what the AI actually does or whether free tools already do it. The American Foundation for the Blind has named this pattern "automated inclusion": "the use of algorithms to create the appearance of accessibility without actually investing in accessibility infrastructure, human labor, or user autonomy."⁷

Fear drives purchasing, not evaluation. Lainey Feingold has written that she "dislikes talking about the number of web accessibility lawsuits filed because that often instills fear and leads people to search for a quick fix and license an overlay product."⁸ The accessibility compliance market is organized around lawsuit risk. Legal protections exist to enforce accessibility, but when fear of litigation replaces commitment to access, the protection becomes a market signal rather than a standard. Vendors lead with litigation statistics. Buyers purchase based on legal exposure, not product evaluation. When fear is the motivator, the buyer optimizes for the appearance of compliance (a VPAT, an overlay badge, an automated scan report) rather than the reality of access. The compliance artifact becomes a legal shield, not evidence of accessibility.

Savior narratives shape coverage. Tech press covers accessibility startups by profiling founders and fundraising rounds, not by testing products with disabled users. The Open Notebook's journalism guide explicitly warns reporters to avoid covering disability dongles, to "prioritize lived experiences over company press releases," and to "actively engage with disabled communities."⁹ The guide recommends following up "months or even years later to see whether a product was successful," acknowledging that most coverage follows the launch announcement without checking whether the product works. When uncritical coverage enters the public record, it becomes a source that future buyers, journalists, and policymakers cite.

Ambiguity protects false claims. When responsibilities are vague, standards unenforced, and documentation incomplete, false claims persist without challenge. No single actor owns verification. The vendor self-reports. The procurement officer trusts the report. The development team trusts the procurement. The disabled user discovers the truth. By the time the claim is tested against reality, the product is deployed and the budget is spent.

Exclusion of disabled people enables every mechanism above. When disabled people hold no power over procurement, no voice in product evaluation, and no seat at the editorial table, false claims face no challenge from the people who would detect them immediately. James Charlton's foundational principle, "Nothing About Us Without Us," names the condition that produces both disinformation and misinformation in accessibility.¹⁰ Decisions are made without the people they affect. The false claim survives because the person who would catch it is not in the room.

Where It Happens (ENABLE Stages)

ENABLE Stage	How Disinformation and Misinformation Show Up
Set Requirements that Include Accessibility	Misinformation about legal obligations ("It's not legally required for our sector") or about what compliance means. Vendors claim WCAG conformance that procurement officers accept without verification.
Create Accessible Content	AI-generated alt text marketed as equivalent to human-authored descriptions. The AFB has noted that when alt text becomes "an automated output rather than a designed input, blind users are once again positioned as afterthoughts."⁷
Design Accessible Experiences	Beliefs that "screen readers will figure it out" or that visual design defaults are sufficient. Overlay widgets marketed as making any design accessible without modifying the underlying code.
Develop Accessible Implementations	Developers told "we'll fix accessibility later" or that automated tools will catch everything. AI code remediation marketed as replacing the need for developers to learn accessible coding practices.
Test for Accessibility	Automated scores treated as comprehensive evaluations. A 100/100 score is reported as "fully accessible" when 60-70% of WCAG criteria require human judgment.²
Triage and Prioritize Accessibility Issues	Issues deprioritized because "only one user reported that" or reclassified as "feature requests" based on the false belief that the product is already compliant.
Iterate to Address Shortcomings	Iterations focus on optics (updating the VPAT, running a new scan) rather than fixing the barriers disabled users reported. The compliance artifact is updated. The barrier remains.
Create Stopgaps	Overlays marketed as complete solutions, misrepresenting temporary surface patches as permanent fixes. The FTC found that accessiBe misled that its widget could achieve full compliance "within 48 hours."¹
Submit Feedback to Creators	Users' reports dismissed as "isolated issues" or attributed to their assistive technology. Adrian Roselli has documented the pattern of developers blaming screen readers for failures caused by their own code.¹¹
Assert One's Rights	Institutions use compliance artifacts (VPATs, automated scan reports, overlay badges) as legal defenses against accessibility complaints, forcing disabled people to prove that the documentation is false.
Stage a Protest	Disabled people and accessibility professionals organize counter-narratives (Overlay Fact Sheet, 1,000+ signatories) to challenge vendor claims that their own customers and the press have accepted.¹²

How It Disables

Disinformation and misinformation disable by placing false claims between the builder and the barrier. The claim says the barrier is not there. The barrier remains.

They normalize neglect. When a compliance artifact says "accessible," the builder stops looking. The overlay badge, the automated score, and the VPAT each say "done" when nothing is done. The false claim creates institutional permission to stop caring. This is the most specific harm: misinformation does not merely fail to help. It actively prevents real care by making builders believe care has already been delivered.
They shift the burden to the disabled user. When a product is marketed as accessible, the person who cannot use it appears to be the problem. "It works for everyone else" is a gaslighting statement directed at the person whose assistive technology was never tested against. The false claim inverts accountability: the builder's failure becomes the user's complaint.
They make barriers invisible and unchallengeable. When misinformation obscures the barrier, the disabled user cannot name what is wrong. The VPAT says conformant. The automated scan says 100/100. The marketing says accessible. The user's screen reader cannot complete checkout. The user does not know whether the problem is their setup, the site, or the compliance claim. Misinformation makes the barrier harder to locate and harder to fight.
They impose correction labor on disabled people. Every false claim creates new work for the people it harms. Over 700 accessibility professionals signed the Overlay Fact Sheet.¹² Adrian Roselli maintains years of documentation correcting vendor claims.¹¹ Steve Clower, a blind software developer, published a guide to blocking an accessibility overlay after his apartment building adopted it.¹³ Some disabled users install browser extensions like AccessiByeBye to block overlay widgets entirely. The "accessibility tool" is so harmful that users must actively prevent it from loading.¹³ This labor is imposed by the misinformation and performed by disabled people, often without compensation.
They erode trust. Each false promise teaches disabled people to distrust the next one. After repeated exposure to products marketed as accessible that are not, disabled users develop the same screening routines the disability dongles page documents: pattern recognition earned through repeated betrayal.
They divert resources from solutions that work. Every dollar spent on an overlay that the FTC later fines is a dollar not spent on fixing the source code. Every procurement decision based on an unverified VPAT is a decision that could have required a live assistive technology test instead.

Disinformation and misinformation disable by making inaccessibility look like accessibility.

Why It Matters

Disinformation and misinformation get into the body, reshape behavior, and distort the systems meant to deliver inclusion.

Disinformation and misinformation inflict embodied harm. A blind user navigates to a website that claims to be accessible. The overlay widget intercepts their assistive technology, rewriting the page in ways that break their established workflow. They spend twenty minutes trying to complete a task that should take two. Their assistive technology conflicts with the overlay's modifications. Some blind users have reported that overlays made websites less accessible than they were before installation.¹⁴ The false claim did not just fail to help. It created a new barrier that the user's body had to absorb.

Disinformation and misinformation produce chronic stress. Bruce McEwen's concept of allostatic load describes the cumulative "wear and tear on the body" from repeated adaptation to chronic stress.¹⁵ Each new false accessibility claim triggers a cycle: the product is marketed as accessible, the disabled user tries it, it fails, the user reports the failure, the report is dismissed or attributed to their assistive technology, the user explains why the claim is false, the explanation is ignored or met with hostility. Hidde de Vries has documented this pattern of accessibility advocates who report inaccessibility receiving ableist responses.¹⁶ This cycle repeats across products, vendors, and years. What accumulates is not just frustration but physiological wear.

Disinformation and misinformation perpetuate structural violence. In Johan Galtung's formulation, structural violence is harm "built into the structure" so that "there may not be any person who directly harms another person."¹⁷ No single actor in the accessibility compliance chain intends to harm disabled people. The vendor writes an optimistic VPAT. The procurement officer accepts it. The journalist profiles the startup. The automated tool reports a score. The organization displays a badge. At no point does any individual decide to exclude disabled people. The structure produces exclusion because every node in the chain rewards claims over evidence, and no node requires verification by the people affected.

Disinformation and misinformation gaslight. When a product is marketed as accessible and a disabled person cannot use it, the marketing contradicts their lived experience. "It works for everyone else" tells the disabled user that their perception is wrong. "We're WCAG compliant" tells them the barrier they are experiencing does not exist. Adrian Roselli has documented the specific pattern of developers blaming screen readers for failures caused by their own code. Developers attributing the barrier to the user's assistive technology rather than the builder's implementation is gaslighting at the structural level.¹¹ The false claim makes the disabled person doubt their own experience.

Disinformation and misinformation erode public accountability. When false claims are widely accepted, it becomes harder to hold institutions responsible for their neglect. The VPAT becomes a legal defense. The automated scan report becomes evidence of due diligence. The overlay badge becomes a visible commitment to accessibility. Sheri Byrne-Haber has argued that some organizations calculate that paying occasional settlements when disabled people assert their rights is cheaper than investing in actual accessibility.¹⁸ When compliance artifacts are accepted as evidence of access, institutions can maintain inaccessibility while pointing to documentation that says otherwise.

Disinformation and misinformation follow historical patterns. The pattern of institutions making false claims about disability inclusion is not new. Sheltered workshops claimed to provide meaningful employment while paying sub-minimum wages. Institutions claimed to provide care while warehousing disabled residents. Telethons claimed to help disabled children while disabled adults protested outside. In each case, the narrative of inclusion coexisted with the reality of exclusion, and the narrative was believed over the people who lived the reality. The accessibility overlay that claims compliance while breaking screen readers is the digital continuation of this pattern: an institution says "we're helping" while the people it claims to help say "you're not," and the institution's claim is believed.

Disinformation and misinformation rewire behavior. After enough false claims, disabled people learn to pre-screen. They test products before trusting them. They read VPATs with suspicion. They search for the Overlay Fact Sheet before trying a new site. They develop third-party tool arsenals to block the so-called accessibility tools that make the web less accessible. What looks like cynicism is expertise. It is the behavioral adaptation that false promises produce. The Smashing Magazine research team has documented how accessibility research with disabled participants "often occurs too late in a project" and is "far too often viewed as separate from other research studies," reinforcing "the notion of separate-and-not-equal."¹⁹ When disabled people's input is structurally excluded and their reports are structurally dismissed, they adapt by building their own workarounds. This labor is often invisible and unpaid, although visibility and compensation would not remove the labor.

Disinformation and misinformation send social signals. When a vendor claims accessibility and the claim is accepted uncritically by the press, by investors, and by procurement offices, the signal is that accessibility is a checkbox. Accessibility is to be claimed, not demonstrated. Accessibility is to be purchased, not built. Accessibility is to be solved with a widget, a scan, or a badge. These falsehoods shape how organizations allocate resources, how journalists cover disability technology, and how disabled people are positioned in the systems that claim to serve them. The signal says your experience is less authoritative than our documentation.

Real-World Examples

In the news

FTC Orders accessiBe to Pay $1 Million for Deceptive Accessibility Claims (January 2025)
-- Federal Trade Commission

The FTC found that accessiBe falsely claimed its AI overlay could make websites fully WCAG-compliant within 48 hours and "deceptively formatted third-party articles and reviews to appear as if they were independent opinions." This was disinformation: the company knew the claims were false and fabricated the appearance of independent validation. The enforcement action was the first major federal case against accessibility disinformation. Eric Bailey had previously deconstructed the company's marketing narrative, noting that accessiBe had approximately $40 million in venture capital while positioning itself as a scrappy innovator, and that the product "de-centers disabled individuals."²⁰

BloomsyBox Sues UserWay Over False Accessibility and Compliance Claims (February 2025)
-- Law Office of Lainey Feingold

BloomsyBox sued UserWay for "false and misleading representations regarding its product's ability to achieve 'full ADA and WCAG 2.1 compliance'" and its "$1,000,000 pledge" for legal support. After installing the overlay, BloomsyBox was sued for accessibility violations within six months. When they sought UserWay's promised legal support, they were told their monthly subscription did not qualify. After upgrading to an annual plan, they received a generic "Legal Action Guide" and their ticket was closed. BloomsyBox incurred $4,000 in attorney fees and settled the ADA lawsuit themselves.²¹ The product created the legal exposure it claimed to prevent.

Blind People and Advocates Slam Company Claiming to Make Websites ADA Compliant (2021)
-- April Glaser, NBC News

Blind disability rights advocates publicly documented how accessiBe products were making websites harder to navigate, not easier. Users reported problems on social media, filed formal complaints, and received dismissive responses. An expert witness analyzed 50 websites using accessiBe and "discovered thousands of problems and found them no more accessible than sites not using it."¹⁴ The coverage documented what happens when disabled users challenge disinformation: their experience is dismissed, their labor is uncompensated, and the vendor's marketing continues.

Bashin v. ReserveCalifornia: $1.75M Settlement for False Accessibility Claims (2023)
-- David Gibson, Accessibility.Works

California spent $66 million on ReserveCalifornia.com. The vendors (Conduent and US eDirect) claimed the site was WCAG 2.0 A/AA compliant. It was not. Bryan Bashin, a California resident with vision loss, could not reserve a campsite. The case alleged the vendors knowingly misrepresented the website's accessibility to secure government funding. The settlement established that web developers can be held legally liable for failing to meet contractual WCAG compliance guarantees.²² This is what happens when a false VPAT enters a procurement pipeline: $66 million is spent, the product is inaccessible, and a disabled person must file a lawsuit to prove the documentation was wrong.

Justice Department Secures Agreement with UC Berkeley on Online Content Accessibility (2022)
-- U.S. Department of Justice

After an eight-year DOJ investigation, UC Berkeley entered a consent decree requiring it to make online content accessible. The investigation found that "much of this online content is not accessible to people with disabilities because it lacks captions and transcripts for individuals who are deaf and alternative text describing visual images for individuals who are blind."²³ In a parallel case, the National Association of the Deaf sued Harvard and MIT for failing to caption their MOOCs -- courses that both institutions publicly offered as part of their commitment to open education.²⁴ These are institutions that champion inclusion publicly while failing on measurable accessibility standards. The gap between the public claim and the user experience is misinformation sustained by institutional reputation.

Over 1,000 accessibility professionals, advocates, and disabled users signed the Overlay Fact Sheet, documenting that overlays "do not repair the underlying accessibility of the website" and can "actually get in the way of access" for assistive technology users.¹² The fact sheet is a community-maintained counter-narrative, a form of protest performed as unpaid labor by the people harmed by the false claims.
UsableNet's 2024 report found that 25% of all digital accessibility lawsuits targeted websites using overlay tools, cited as barriers to access, not solutions.²⁵ The tools marketed as legal protection increased legal exposure.
The GSA's FY24 Section 508 Assessment found that federal agencies scored just below 2 on a 5-point accessibility compliance scale. Fewer than half of agencies' most-viewed ICT assets were fully conformant. 48% of agencies had no formal accessibility program or were still developing one.⁴
A peer-reviewed study at ACM ASSETS '24 found that "AI-powered overlays are not effective in remediating website accessibility errors." While overlays could correct simple errors, "there were flaws in their corrections" and "major accessibility problems remain for keyboard and screen-reader users."²⁶
Some disabled users install browser extensions like AccessiByeBye to block accessibility overlays entirely. Steve Clower, a blind software developer, published a guide to blocking an accessibility overlay after his apartment building adopted it for its website.¹³ The "accessibility tool" is blocked by the people it claims to serve.

What Care Sounds Like

"We tested this with disabled users before we published the VPAT."
"Our automated scan catches 30% of issues. The rest requires manual testing with assistive technologies. We do both."
"We do not claim WCAG compliance. We publish what we've tested, what we've fixed, and what remains."
"Accessibility failures are production bugs. They go in the current sprint, not the backlog."
"We hired disabled designers to lead the evaluation. Their findings override the automated report."
"We corrected our marketing after users told us it was inaccurate."

What Neglect Sounds Like

"Our marketing team said it's accessible, so it must be."
"We'll just add an accessibility widget. That should cover us legally."
"Nobody complained, so it must be working for everyone."
"The VPAT says conformant. We don't need to test it ourselves."
"The automated scan gave us 100. We're done."
"Real accessibility is too expensive, so we just focus on making it look good."
"It works for everyone else."

Disinformation and misinformation replace evidence with narrative and verification with trust. ENABLE names these forces so that compliance artifacts cannot substitute for disabled people's experience -- and so that false claims about accessibility are recognized as the structural harm they are.

Perfect by nature
Icons of self indulgence
Just what we all need
More lies about a world that
Never was and never will be
Have you no shame don't you see me
You know you've got everybody fooled
-- Evanescence

What It Is​

Why It Happens​

Where It Happens (ENABLE Stages)​

How It Disables​

Why It Matters​

Real-World Examples​

What Care Sounds Like​

What Neglect Sounds Like​

Footnotes​

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