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 Pharr, 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 | 11 | 84.9 MB | 167 | link-name |
| Government | 0 | 0 | 0.6 MB | 132 | — |
| Agendas and minutes | 2 | 100 | 0.5 MB | 139 | aria-progressbar-name |
| Mayor and commissioners | 0 | 0 | 3.4 MB | 141 | — |
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.
- The agendas and minutes page: 100 failing elements. Ninety progress bars with no accessible name, and ten elements carrying ARIA attributes that are not permitted on them. That is the page holding the public record — the one page on a city site where a resident has a legal interest in being able to read it.
- The home page: 85 MB, and 8 autoplaying videos with 0 pause controls. No automated tool reports this, because no automated tool can. WCAG 2.2.2 asks that anything moving for more than five seconds can be paused. Eighty megabytes is also its own barrier: on a phone in a colonia that is the page not loading.
- 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 hero, one fiftieth of the weight
The video at the top of this site is the city's own footage. It was re-encoded to about 420 KB a clip, it never autoplays for anyone who has asked their device for reduced motion — they are not even sent the file — and it carries a visible pause button that a keyboard can reach.
Nothing was lost that a visitor could see. What was removed was seventy-nine megabytes of it.
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
Agendas and minutes inside a document viewer
Instead
Meetings published as text: every motion, every roll call by name, searchable and translatable.
Today
Eighty megabytes of hero video on the front page
Instead
The same footage, in this theme, at about a fiftieth of the weight — with a pause control and no download at all for anyone who asked for less motion.
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 27 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.