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 Weslaco, 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 7 September 2026 with axe-core in a real browser, against WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 at levels A and AA — the same engine most paid audits run underneath. Six pages. These are real numbers from the live site, not a characterisation of it, and the raw run is in the repository behind this page.
| Page | Issue types | Elements failing | Downloaded | Requests | Worst rule |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The home page | 6 | 34 | 16.0 MB | 213 | button-name |
| City Commission | 4 | 9 | 13.1 MB | 158 | color-contrast |
| Open meetings | 4 | 14 | 10.4 MB | 158 | color-contrast |
| Departments | 4 | 9 | 11.0 MB | 150 | color-contrast |
| Parks | 4 | 9 | 24.2 MB | 149 | color-contrast |
| Explore Weslaco | 4 | 9 | 27.6 MB | 179 | color-contrast |
Being fair about it
The city's site is not a disaster and this proposal does not pretend it is. Most of what a scanner flags here is small. But three things we measured are not small, and two of them a scanner would never name at all.
- The city's logo is a 4.6 MB file, and every page downloads it twice. It is a 4096 × 4096 pixel PNG, shown at about 90 pixels tall in the header — and the file the footer loads is byte-for-byte the same file under a different name. That is roughly nine and a half megabytes of the same picture on every page a resident opens, before any of the page's own content. It is why the departments index — a page that is a list of links and nothing else — weighs 11 MB.
- The interior pages switch off pinch-zoom. Every interior page we tested carries maximum-scale=1 in its viewport tag, which tells a phone to refuse to enlarge the page. That is WCAG 1.4.4, and the people it stops are exactly the people who most need the page: anyone whose eyes want the text bigger. The home page does not do it — so this is not a decision, it is a line of markup nobody has looked at.
- The parks page sends a 24 MB page to show you a park. Nearly fourteen megabytes of it is a single animated GIF. Explore Weslaco is heavier still. On a phone on a metered plan — and Weslaco's median household income is $54,995 — that is not a slow page, it is a page that does not arrive. This whole site — both languages, all 140 pages, every photograph and every font — is 5.0 MB on disk, which is less than that one GIF.
- 34 failing elements on the home page, 27 of them contrast. Text set too pale against what is behind it, a select with no accessible name, three buttons with no discernible text, and the YouTube frame the background video runs in with no name on it either. Every one of those is fixable, and every one of them comes back the next time somebody edits a page — which is the argument for a check that runs on the build rather than on a calendar.
- 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 — the logo and the pinch-zoom above among them — are decided while the page is being written, and cannot be bolted on later by anybody.
The same city, a thirtieth of the weight
The city's own front page opens a YouTube player and runs a video behind the words. This one opens with a photograph the city took itself, cropped and re-encoded to the sizes the page actually asks for. The whole front page is 519 KB in a real browser — measured the same way the city's 16.0 MB was — over twenty requests, all to one host. Nothing autoplays, so nothing needs a pause button, and no third party is told who is reading.
The seal in the masthead is the city's own artwork, re-encoded from the same 4,834,890-byte original the city serves. A page here carries about twenty-eight kilobytes of it — the masthead's copy and the footer's — against the city's nine and a half megabytes. Nothing was lost that a visitor could see. What was removed was the other 99.7 per cent of it.
The same notices, as text
Rather than describe the difference, this build makes it. Six of the city’s own notices are published here in full — 4 of them the ones the front page shows as nothing but a poster, including the storm-damage notice the city wrote out in both languages and then flattened into a picture. Every headline, date, hour, address and figure is the city’s, reproduced rather than invented.
What it replaces
Today
A 4.8 MB logo on every page, twice
Instead
The same artwork at eleven kilobytes, and a build that will not publish a page it has not checked.
Today
Pinch-zoom switched off on the interior pages
Instead
Three text sizes in the header, honoured site-wide, on top of whatever the phone already does.
Today
Agendas and minutes inside a document viewer
Instead
Meetings published as text: every motion, every roll call by name, searchable and translatable.
Today
A twenty-four megabyte page to show you a park
Instead
The city's own photographs, cropped and re-encoded — the whole site on disk is smaller than that one GIF.
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 with the districts the city itself prints, all 35 departments and divisions the city's own site lists, the population, the founding year, the figures on the home page, the geography of every facility on the map, the photographs, 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.