It’s really this thing that gets me.

Let’s say you’re on a big mission in the world.

You think websites should be more accessible. Websites should work for anyone regardless of their disabilities.

You also think the web right now is failing in this regard. There are far too many inaccessible websites existing and being created.

You think that educating developers is great and that developers should make accessible websites, but that’s not doing enough. It’s not working.

Neither is governmental enforcement.

Now you’ve got a big idea. You think technology itself can fix websites. You can literally fix the accessibility of websites with more code on the fly by injecting your own additional UI on top of the website.

You’ve even built this technology, and it works great. (This is very much not the case, but let’s assume you’re convinced.)

But now you’re at a fork in the road.

It’s not a fork of giving this technology away for free or not, you’ve already decided to profit from it. Work is work, capitalism is capitalism, so be it.

It’s a fork of who your customer is.

Down one road, you could sell this technology as a browser extension. Users would use it as such, and literally every single website they visit would become perfectly accessible for them. Your goal of making the web accessible for all is achieved for your users.

Down the other road, you could sell the technology as something that is installed on one particular website. This doesn’t go as far at fixing the accessibility of the web, as even if half of all websites buy it (zero chance), that only fixes half of the web for people that need it.

Doesn’t it seem like the first road is better? It helps the people who need it more completely. It’s a direct alignment of needs and fixes.

But you don’t go this road, you sell to individual websites.

Why would you do that?

Because this isn’t about helping people it’s about money.

What is the bigger addressable market? Individual people with disabilities who might be convinced to buy a browser plugin? Or every single website who might be convinced this is the best path to accessibility, and more, the best path to not getting sued.

Paid browser plugins are barely a thing at all. Software for websites is big business. You don’t wanna sell tens of thousands of $19.99 B-to-C products. You want to sell hundreds of thousands of $1,499 (annually) of B-to-B products.

Congratulations you’re an overlay company.

Hey I get it. You gotta make bucks in this world and convincing people to buy products is a classic. But this is a literal scam. You’re scammers. You sell a thing that doesn’t work to companies you’re trying to scare for a bunch of money.