On April 22, 2025, the Federal Trade Commission approved a final order requiring accessiBe to pay $1 million and restricting claims about its automated website accessibility product. The company had sold a proposition with obvious appeal: install its software and make a website accessible without undertaking the work yourself.
The disputed promise went beyond helping fix particular barriers. It concerned whether the product could make any website comply with accessibility guidelines and keep it compliant as the website changed.
That distinction drives the case. Evidence that software performs useful tasks does not establish that it delivers every result advertised.
The Promise Covered the Whole Website—and Its Future
The FTC’s January 2025 announcement described accessWidget as an AI-powered plug-in marketed to website owners; the complaint describes it as an overlay, which makes temporary user-interface changes such as contrast and text size rather than permanently altering site code. The agency alleged that the product did not make all customer websites compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG.
WCAG supplies technical criteria for making web content accessible to people with disabilities. Version 2.1 sets out 72 success criteria across three levels, and a site must satisfy every applicable Level A and AA criterion to be considered compliant; Level AA is the common benchmark. A website can present barriers when, for example, someone cannot navigate a menu using a keyboard or a screen reader cannot convey the information in an image.
According to the FTC’s complaint, accessiBe advertised that one line of code would address 30 percent of WCAG requirements immediately, with AI addressing the remaining 70 percent within 48 hours. It also promoted rescanning every 24 hours to maintain compliance. The complaint identified alleged failures involving menus, headings, tables, images, and other content, and alleged that the company’s own internal testing found errors on nearly all websites it tested.
Those representations asked customers to accept several propositions at once: the software would identify the relevant barriers, correct them across the website, and continue doing so after changes. Success on one task would not prove all three.
The FTC also questioned who appeared to be vouching for the product. Its April announcement described allegations that paid articles and reviews had been presented as independent opinions without disclosure of material connections to the company.
A buyer evaluating reliability therefore faced two different questions: what evidence supported the advertised result, and whether apparently independent praise was independent at all. The complaint pleaded those as separate counts: unsubstantiated performance claims, deceptively formatted advertising, and failure to disclose material connections.
The Order Requires Evidence Before the Claim
The final consent order, issued April 21, 2025 against accessiBe Inc. and accessiBe Ltd. as Docket C-4817, bars misleading representations and requires competent and reliable evidence — evidence conducted and evaluated in an objective manner by qualified persons — for covered claims about the product’s benefits, performance, and effectiveness. That evidence must exist when the claim is made. The provisions expressly reach representations that a covered product “can make any website compliant with WCAG” or “can ensure continued automatic compliance with WCAG over time as website content changes.”
The order also requires disclosure, before a customer incurs a financial obligation, that the product will not correct barriers on third-party domains or subdomains that may be part of the overall user experience unless those domains also use the product. It restricts misrepresentations about independent endorsements and requires disclosure of material connections.
The January action was a proposed consent order open for thirty days of public comment, which the Commission voted three to nothing to finalize in April. AccessiBe neither admitted nor denied the substantive allegations. This is a binding settlement, not a judgment after a contested trial establishing a product defect. Its requirements bind the respondents for twenty years from issuance; they do not create a new certification standard for every AI product.
The FTC’s completed action nevertheless identifies a concrete problem. A claim of comprehensive, continuing compliance carries a much larger evidentiary burden than a claim that software corrects specified barriers under specified conditions.
The Customer’s Journey Can Extend Beyond the Installation
Consider a hypothetical healthcare organization using an accessibility product on its main website. A patient reads about a service and follows a link to an appointment platform operated on another domain. Later, the patient encounters a separate payment service.
An installation on the main site does not, by itself, establish that the appointment and payment services are accessible. For the patient, these are parts of one effort to obtain care. For the software, they can be separate environments outside its reach.
The order’s third-party disclosure requirement makes that gap visible before purchase. It addresses a practical dependency that a broad promise can conceal: the advertised outcome depends on where the product operates and what it can change.
The same distinction applies over time. A test performed on today’s pages does not establish the accessibility of tomorrow’s forms, navigation, or embedded services. A continuing-compliance claim requires support for continued performance under the conditions the claim covers.
That is an inference from the claims and restrictions in this case. The order does not prescribe a universal testing program for AI systems.
