Prototype. A working redesign concept for the Village of Round Lake, built by Stoa for the Website Design Services RFP. This is not the live Village website.
Village Hall · Mon–Thu 8:00 a.m.–4:30 p.m. · Fri 8:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.
Village of Round Lake seal: a dove over the lake, established 1908 Round Lake, Illinois Lake County · Est. 1908

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Accessibility, with receipts

Built to WCAG 2.1 AA from the first line of markup and audited with a script anyone can rerun.

Why this matters right now

Under the Department of Justice's 2024 rule implementing Title II of the ADA, public entities with under 50,000 residents must bring their web content into WCAG 2.1 AA conformance by April 26, 2027. Round Lake (pop. 18,721) is in that cohort. The new website is the single biggest step toward meeting it.

The audit, in numbers

0 WCAG 2.1 A/AA violations on this prototype

Every page, every route measured with axe-core via Playwright, June 2026. The script ships with the proposal so the Village can rerun it on demand.

4 Serious violations found on the current site's Elected Officials page

Four image links with no accessible name (axe rule: link-name). A screen reader announces them as nothing. Two of those links also point to stale or misspelled addresses, including a former official's mailbox.

Credit where due: the current site passes automated checks on several pages we tested. But automated tools catch only a fraction of WCAG. They can't judge focus order, reading order, link purpose, PDF accessibility, or whether the auto-advancing homepage carousel can be paused. Those take a human audit, which is part of the proposed work.

What's built in here

  • Keyboard-first. Every control reachable and operable by keyboard, with a visible focus outline.
  • Skip link and landmarks. Header, nav, main, and footer landmarks on every page; one H1 per page; logical heading order.
  • AA contrast. Text over photos sits on gradient scrims tuned to hold 4.5:1.
  • Labeled controls. Search fields, filters, and forms carry programmatic labels, not just placeholders.
  • Bilingual by design. Spanish pages are real authored content with lang attributes. Screen readers pronounce them correctly, unlike machine-overlay translation.
  • Reflow. Pages work at mobile widths and 200% zoom without horizontal scrolling.
  • HTML over PDF. Key information lives in accessible HTML, searchable and screen-reader-friendly.

Note for reviewers The audit numbers above are real and current: the prototype is tested by scripts/qa-roundlake-prototype.mjs (Playwright + axe-core, WCAG 2.1 A/AA rule set) across all 25 pages, and the current-site findings come from running the same engine against roundlakeil.gov on June 9, 2026. Raw JSON is included in the proposal packet. We publish the method because the number only matters if you can reproduce it.