About this proposal
Built accessible, not audited later
What this is, what we measured, and what it would replace.
What this is
A working proposal for the City of Mission, not the city's website. It was built to be looked at rather than described: every page here is real HTML the city could serve tomorrow, in both languages, produced by the same build that makes the commission record, the fleet map and the two apps.
What we measured on the city's site
Taken 6 September 2026 with axe-core, the same engine most paid audits run underneath, against WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 at levels A and AA. These are real numbers from the live site, not a characterisation of it.
| Page | Issue types | Elements failing | Downloaded | Requests | Worst rule |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The home page | 2 | 2 | 26.2 MB | 127 | color-contrast |
| Government | 4 | 10 | 2.0 MB | 52 | listitem |
| howdoi | 4 | 7 | 2.1 MB | 52 | listitem |
| community | 4 | 7 | 2.1 MB | 52 | listitem |
Being fair about it
Two of the four pages we tested returned no automated violations at all. The city's site is not a disaster, and this proposal does not pretend it is. The findings cluster in two places, and both of them matter more than a score.
- A critical fault in the main navigation, on every interior page. Every interior page we tested returns the same set: an element with an ARIA role whose required children are missing, list items outside any list, and a list holding things that are not list items. It is one broken menu, repeated site-wide, and it is the control a keyboard or screen-reader user must get through before reaching anything at all.
- The home page: 26 MB, and a frame with no name. Twenty-six megabytes over a hundred and twenty-seven requests. On a phone on a metered plan out past Mile 4, that is the page not loading. The embedded frame with no accessible name is smaller, but a screen reader announces it as nothing at all.
- Automated testing catches about a third of real barriers. Which is the honest argument for building it in rather than testing it afterwards: the two-thirds a scanner cannot see are decided while the page is being written, and cannot be bolted on later by anybody.
The same city, one per cent of the weight
Every photograph on this site was published by the City of Mission — the butterflies it is named for, Shary Municipal Golf Course by day and under the Starlight lights, a city crew, a community event. Cropped and re-encoded to the sizes the pages actually request, this whole front page weighs about a quarter of a megabyte against the city's twenty-six.
What is deliberately not used is most of the rest: event flyers with the date, the address and the phone number set as pixels inside a JPEG. A screen reader gets nothing from those, a search finds nothing in them, and they cannot be translated. Using them as decoration on this page would contradict the page.
What it replaces
Today
An accessibility audit, bought after the build
Instead
A conformance check that runs on every build and blocks the deploy when it fails.
Today
A main navigation failing a critical ARIA check on every page
Instead
Meetings published as text: every motion, every roll call by name, searchable and translatable.
Today
Twenty-six megabytes on the front page
Instead
The city's own photographs, cropped and re-encoded, at about one per cent of the weight.
Today
A fleet system only Public Works can see
Instead
One map for staff and one screen for the resident, from the same record.
Today
Spanish as a translation plugin
Instead
Spanish written, with its own URLs, shipping in the same build as English.
What is real here and what is not
Real: the city's seal and motto, the mayor, the city manager, the six commissioners, all 30 departments with the slugs the city's own site uses, the population, the founding year, the geography of every facility on the map, the hero footage, the Texas statutes cited on the meeting page, and every accessibility measurement above.
Invented: every agenda item, motion, vote, dollar amount, speaker, service request, vehicle position and maintenance record. They are shaped like a city of this size, and every page that shows one says so.