If your town's website has a small accessibility icon floating in one corner, and clicking it opens a panel with bigger text and higher contrast, somebody sold you that as compliance. It is worth knowing what you actually bought.
What it does
It is code that loads after your page has loaded and tries to repair it from the outside. It finds photos with no description and guesses. It finds unlabelled buttons and guesses. It offers people a menu of adjustments their browser and their phone already offered them.
What it does not do is change your website. Everything underneath is exactly as it was. Every unnamed button is still unnamed. Every unreadable heading is still unreadable. The audit that found those problems will find them again next year, and you will have paid another annual fee in the meantime.
The people it claims to help have been clear
Screen reader users have said, repeatedly and in public, that these things get in the way of the tools they already use and have set up the way they like them. There are open letters with hundreds of signatures from people who do this work professionally saying the same thing.
The lawsuits have not stopped either. A fair number of them name websites that had one of these installed at the time.
We are not going to pretend this is a subtle question, because it is not.
Why towns buy them anyway
Because the alternative on offer was a rebuild, and a rebuild means a capital project, a procurement process and a board vote. The widget was a line item somebody could approve this month.
Given those two options it is a perfectly rational purchase. We would rather fix the options than lecture anyone about the choice.
What that money is actually for
Here is the useful way to think about it.
You are paying every year for something that leaves your website exactly as it was. That annual line item is roughly what a platform costs that does not need one. Not a rebuild every five years. Software where the things on that audit report cannot happen in the first place.
And the uncomfortable version, which we will say plainly: if a company's answer to an accessibility problem is a script you paste into your template, they have quietly told you that fixing the actual website was never on the table.