Melissa is a licensed occupational therapist. Her OT training taught her how people with disabilities actually interact with websites, apps, and digital tools that were clearly never built with them in mind.
Tyler is an engineer who builds every website from scratch in Next.js. No WordPress. No templates. No page builders. Every line of code is intentional.
When the two of us started Egmer, we did not need a government guideline to tell us that websites should work for everyone. Melissa already knew from years of OT practice. Tyler already knew. He sees it in the code.
But WCAG exists, and you should understand what it is.
The Short Version
WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It is a set of recommendations from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that defines what it means for a website to be usable by people with disabilities.
Think of it like building codes for the web. Your physical store needs ramps and proper signage. Your website needs features that let everyone interact with it, regardless of how they navigate.
What Actually Makes a Website Inaccessible?
You might not realize your website has barriers. Most business owners do not. Here is what we find when we check prospect sites (and we typically find dozens of violations on a single site):
Images without descriptions. Someone using a screen reader, which is software that reads websites aloud for blind users, cannot understand what your photos show. We see this on nearly every site we check.
Low color contrast. Gray text on a white background looks clean, but people with low vision cannot read it. Melissa knows from her OT background that people with visual impairments struggle with exactly this.
Videos without captions. Deaf and hard of hearing visitors miss your message entirely. Auto captions are better than nothing, but they are often inaccurate.
Buttons that only work with a mouse. Some people navigate websites using only their keyboard or voice control. If your menu, forms, or call to action buttons require a mouse, those visitors are locked out.
Blinking or flashing content. This can trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy. It is not hypothetical. It is a medical reality that Melissa understands from her training as an occupational therapist.
A Quick History
WCAG was first published in 1999. The versions you will hear about:
WCAG 2.0 is the foundational standard.
WCAG 2.1 added guidelines for mobile devices and touch screens.
WCAG 2.2 was released in October 2023 and is the newest version.
Each version builds on the previous one. When regulations mention "WCAG compliance," they typically mean WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
Who Needs to Care About This?
Government agencies and contractors have been required to comply since the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
Public accommodations like restaurants, hotels, and retail stores need accessible facilities under the ADA, and courts have increasingly interpreted that to include websites.
Schools and educational institutions receiving federal funding must be accessible.
Small businesses? You are not exempt. ADA compliance lawsuits do not discriminate by company size. In fact, smaller businesses are sometimes easier targets because they are less likely to have legal teams. Over 4,000 ADA related digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2024 alone.
The Numbers
One in four American adults lives with some form of disability. Screen readers. Voice control. Low vision tools. Most websites quietly shut those people out.
96% of the top one million websites have WCAG violations. So you are not alone if your site has issues. But "everyone does it" is not a defense in court, and it is definitely not a reason to keep shutting people out.
What We Do Differently
Most agencies treat accessibility as an afterthought. Maybe they slap an overlay widget on the site and call it done. Those overlays, products like AccessiBe and UserWay, are fake accessibility. The FTC has fined AccessiBe for deceptive practices. Overlay widgets do not fix the underlying code. They just add a layer of theater on top of a broken foundation.
We do not use overlays. We do not bolt accessibility on after the site is built.
Every Egmer site ships with a custom AccessibilityToolbar, skip links, semantic HTML, ARIA attributes, proper heading hierarchy, and keyboard navigation built in from the first line of code. Tyler writes it into the architecture. Melissa validates it against real user needs.
That is the difference between compliance theater and actually caring whether people can use your website.