What Is Level Access? An Audit Company That Owns the Second-Biggest Overlay

What is Level Access cannot be answered with one sentence, and anyone who gives you one is selling something.

It is a 550-person digital accessibility company founded in 1997 as SSB Bart Group, renamed Level Access in 1999, that passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in December 2024. It does expert audits, VPAT and conformance reports, training, governance reporting and program management, for customers including Wells Fargo, Samsung, Visa and Walmart.

It is also, since March 2024, the owner of UserWay, one of the largest accessibility overlays on the market, which it paid $98.7 million in cash for and which it still sells today under the UserWay name with a published rate card.

Both of those are true simultaneously. Any answer to what is Level Access that drops either half is a sales pitch. The accessibility community’s summary leaves out the first. The company’s enterprise marketing leaves out the second.

This piece covers the company and the acquisition, what the platform actually does, what it costs on both sides of the house, the overlay question reported carefully in both directions, the staging capability that beats every governance platform we have looked at, who it is for, and how the two halves fit together.

The short version: the audit practice is good and there is no evidence it has degraded. The overlay is real, still sold, and named on a fact sheet signed by over a thousand practitioners. If you buy Level Access for audits, the risk is not bad audits. It is that your accessibility vendor’s other product is the thing your accessibility consultant will tell you to remove.

What is Level Access, and what did it buy

Level Access is headquartered in Virginia. Its own site says Stafford; other references say Arlington. It reports 550-plus employees and names Mark Zablan as chief executive, appointed in October 2024, succeeding founder Tim Springer.

Its acquisition history runs Simply Accessible in February 2018, a merger with eSSENTIAL Accessibility in August 2022, and UserWay in March 2024. JMI Equity backed Level Access and KKR backed eSSENTIAL Accessibility before the merger. We could not verify the current ownership split.

The UserWay deal, announced 31 December 2023 and completed 20 March 2024, was $98.7 million all cash, at $21.06 a share, a 17 percent premium to the prior close. UserWay was founded in 2016 by Allon Mason, listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in January 2022, and was delisted on completion. Mason became President of Level Access.

For scale, UserWay reported $6.2 million in revenue for the first half of 2023, nearly double year on year, with a net loss of $1.5 million.

What the platform does

Level Access’s modules, in its own words:

• Level Access Platform is "the heart of your digital accessibility program, offering complete visibility into the accessibility of your digital presence"
• Audit & Test is "automated scanning and manual evaluation"
• Build & Fix is "AI-powered remediation and developer tools"
• Governance & Reporting is "monitoring, documentation, and program management"
• Level Access Academy is "accessibility training and certifications"
• Level CI is "accessibility testing in your CI/CD pipeline"
• LevelDocs will "generate accessible PDFs directly from your Microsoft Office files"
• Automated Remediation is "technology for automatically fixing common issues"
• VPATs & ACR covers "product accessibility documentation"
• Manual Testing & Audits is "accessibility evaluations by experts"

Access Assistant is the browser extension for Chrome, Firefox and Edge, which does automatic and manual testing in context and syncs results back to the platform.

In September 2025 the company launched three AI agents, Ask Level, Reporting Agent and Common Findings, for automated testing, simplified fixes and executive-ready reporting. The announcement did not mention UserWay or the widget.

The thing that distinguishes this from every platform we have looked at is the services half. Expert audits, VPAT and conformance report production, formal training with certifications, and program governance. If your deliverable is a document a procurement officer or a board will read, this is the category of vendor that produces it. Siteimprove, Silktide and Acquia Web Governance are scanning and workflow tools with services bolted on. Level Access is a services firm with a platform.

What it costs

Level Access publishes nothing. No price appears anywhere on its site for the platform, audits, training, Level CI or LevelDocs.

UserWay publishes everything, and that rate card is the most transparent pricing in this whole category:

For the enterprise platform, third-party transaction data reports a median of $35,093 a year across 56 purchases, ranging from $18,250 to $122,410.

Look at the gap between those two numbers. A nonprofit can buy the free widget for nothing, or Pro for $490. The platform’s observed floor is $18,250 and its median is $35,093. That thirty-five-fold gap between the two entry points is where the entire strategic argument about this company lives.

The free tier’s own disclaimer is unusually candid and worth quoting to any client considering it:

"the free Widget is focused on the first steps to increasing usability for users with disabilities, but does not have a compliance focus for your site."

The overlay question, both directions

This needs reporting carefully, because both the critics and the company have a point and most coverage picks one.

The facts, first. UserWay is listed on the Overlay Fact Sheet, which defines overlays as technologies that "apply third-party source code (typically JavaScript) to make improvements to the front-end code of the website," carries 1,031 signatories including Steve Faulkner, Léonie Watson, Jared Smith and Sina Bahram, and states that no overlay can make a site fully compliant with any accessibility standard.

Level Access still ships the widget. Three independent confirmations. UserWay sells it today with a published rate card. The Level Access help center has a section titled "Accessibility widget (UserWay)," updated April 2026, documenting integration through the platform. And Level Access’s own Automated Remediation page describes technology that, when installed on your site, "identifies and resolves these errors with every page load." That is a runtime DOM-modifying script by any definition.

But the enterprise marketing does not name it. Neither the software solutions page nor the platform overview mentions UserWay, a widget or an overlay. The same technology appears as "Automated Remediation."

So the company sells one runtime JavaScript product under three names in three places, depending on who is looking. That is not concealment of the product. It is a deliberate separation of the brand from the enterprise buyer’s field of view, and it is fair to say so.

Now the company’s defense, which is stronger than critics usually allow. Level Access published a position statement in February 2024 that accepts the overlay classification rather than dodging it, and explicitly disclaims the thing the community objects to most:

"overlay technology can be an amazing part of an overall solution for accessibility but, on a standalone basis, isn’t sufficient to substantiate compliance"

And founder Tim Springer’s argument for the strategy:

"Access today beats access tomorrow… start now. Get moving. Make things better today."

That is a materially different posture from a vendor claiming an automated product delivers compliance, and a comparison that treats all overlay owners as equivalent is being unfair.

What the community said. Eric Eggert, formerly of the W3C’s accessibility initiative, titled his response "Level Access crosses the line; buys accessibility overlay company." Colleen Gratzer put the objection most precisely:

"Level Access is a reputable accessibility provider, and they used to speak out against overlays. So it was shocking, to say the least, when they bought an overlay company."

Adrian Roselli has documented product-level criticisms over several years, the most serious being a WebAIM finding in June 2023 that UserWay manipulated page content when the WAVE checker was active, so that a page with 46 errors reported zero.

And the analyst view. Forrester, writing on the deal in January 2024, judged that "overlays have limited utility to enterprise buyers in their current form," and flagged a culture risk, that employees on the two sides "hold fundamentally opposing philosophies about accessibility, embedding versus bolt-on." It also gave the commercial rationale, that Level Access "must meet companies where they are."

One product-history note, reported as fact and not as legal analysis: a customer class action was filed against UserWay in 2024 over its marketing claims, and in February 2026 a magistrate judge recommended that key claims proceed past dismissal. The conduct at issue is pre-acquisition UserWay marketing, not Level Access’s current marketing. That distinction matters and is routinely dropped.

The staging capability

Level CI integrates with Selenium, Playwright, Puppeteer, WebdriverIO and Cypress.

More usefully, there is a downloadable on-premises scanner. The documentation, updated April 2026, describes it as "an automated accessibility scanner that can access and scan environments that the platform may not be able to like intranets, development environments, or staging environments." You point it at internal URLs and it pushes results back to the platform.

Authenticated scanning on the hosted platform supports basic authentication for browser modals and secure authentication for web apps and portals.

That puts Level Access ahead of every governance platform we have covered on this axis. Siteimprove and Acquia cannot reach a private network at all. Silktide will do a VPN connection for a published fee. Level Access gives you a scanner you run inside your own network and reports centrally.

The known integration gap is the other direction: the Findings and remediation workflow integrates with Jira only. A 2026 reviewer noted the obvious consequence, that teams on Linear or anything else are out of luck.

Who it is for

The clearest answer to what is Level Access for is this. Genuinely for: organizations that need a program rather than a tool. Where the deliverable is a VPAT, a conformance report, a board-level update, trained staff, expert audits and an auditable trail. Regulated enterprises, large universities, government agencies. That combination is genuinely hard to assemble from point tools.

The smallest customer that gets value has two answers, and the split is the whole story:

Through UserWay: a one-site nonprofit at $0 for the free widget, $490 a year for Pro, or $990 for 100-page monitoring. Instant install, no developer, and a vendor disclaimer telling you the free tier has no compliance focus.

Through the platform: realistically $18,250 a year at the observed floor, with a median around $35,093. Below roughly $20,000 a year, the platform is not the product you are buying.

The consistent criticism across review sites is worth stating precisely because of what it is not. Users complain about a steep learning curve, an overwhelming interface, weak reporting and cost. Nobody in the review corpus says the audits are bad. The predicted compromise of the services business has not shown up in what customers report.

How the two halves fit

The honest framing for a client is this.

Level Access has not compromised its audit practice. It has taken on a brand-management problem: it runs a product its own enterprise marketing will not name, whose pre-acquisition claims are being litigated, and which the practitioner community it recruits from has formally signed against.

And the purity test catches nearly everyone. Deque sold a custom JavaScript overlay called Amaze and published a defense of the category in 2020. The industry does not actually divide into overlay companies and clean companies.

What it divides into is a question worth asking before any purchase in this category: who does this vendor think owns accessibility? Deque says the developer. Siteimprove, Silktide and Acquia say the web team. Level Access says the program manager, and prices accordingly. Buy the one whose assumed owner actually exists in your organization.

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