Launching alongside the long-awaited Jazz Age exhibition, the exciting new large-print label feature on our collection site is a key part of Cooper Hewitt’s ongoing accessibility initiative.

The original goal for the large-print labels project was to create a physical manifestation of our exhibition label content that could be distributed to museum visitors by our Visitor Experiences team upon request. Graphic designer Ayham Ghraowi, one of our 2015 Peter A. Krueger summer interns, worked closely with Micah Walter and Pamela Horn, director of Cross-Platform Publications, to design and develop a prototype application, the Label Book Generator. This prototype, built with Python using the Flask framework and originally hosted on Heroku, produced printable label booklets that met the museum’s standards for accessibility. This prototype was the first big step toward providing an accessible complementary experience of exhibition content for our visitors with low vision.

This fall, using the CSS stylesheets that Ayham developed for his prototype, Digital & Emerging Media experimented with a number of possible ways to deliver this large-print content to VE in production. Ultimately, we decided that rather than establishing a dedicated application for large-print label booklets, integrating the large-print labels into our collection site would be the best solution. This would not only allow us to rely on existing database connections and application code to generate the large-print label documents, but it would also corral all of our exhibition content under one domain, reducing any complications or barriers to discovery for VE and visitors alike. And by providing the label chats for each object, which are otherwise not included in any of our digital content, the large-print pages serve to supplement the main exhibition pages for our website visitors as well, adding a deeper layer of engagement to both the web and in-gallery experiences.

As of today, when a user visits any exhibition page on our collection site or main website, they’ll see a new option in the sidebar, inviting them to view and print the exhibition labels. The large-print page for each exhibition includes A-panel text alongside all available object images and label chats. If an exhibition is organized into thematic sections, this is reflected in the ordering of the large-print labels, and B-panel text is included alongside the section headers.

To generate these pages, I created a new exhibitions_large_print PHP library, which leverages the existing exhibitions, objects, and exhibitions_objects libraries to assemble the necessary information. Because we want to be able to print the large-print pages as one document for in-gallery use, our large-print pages cannot be paginated, unlike our main exhibition pages. This presents no issues for smaller exhibitions, like the ongoing Scraps. But very large exhibitions — like Jazz Age, for example, with over 400 objects — require way too much memory to be processed in production.

To get around this issue, I decided to assemble the large-print label data for certain “oversized” exhibitions in advance and store it in a series of JSON files on the server. A developer can manually run a PHP script to build the JSON files and write them to a data directory, each identified by exhibition ID. The ID for each oversized exhibition is added to a config variable, which tells our application to load from JSON rather than query the database.

https://gist.github.com/rnackman/8ed20dbfdc2962077c0b87975ca80e85

For greater flexibility based on individual needs, our large-print pages include clear and easy-to-locate UI tools for printing and adjusting font size. A user can select one of six default font sizes ranging from 18pt to 28pt, triggering some simple JS to reset the body font size accordingly. Internally, we can use the  pt query string parameter to enable large-print links to open the page with a specific default font size selected. For example, navigating to the large-print label page from an exhibition page using the Large Print sidebar icon opens the page at 24pt font.

https://gist.github.com/rnackman/84b10e7c4c862d128f58140f8adae75b

Visitor Experiences has prepared a number of printed large-print label booklets for our Jazz Age exhibition, available upon request at the front desk. Visitors may also print this document at home and bring it along with them, and any individual can access this responsive page on their desktop or mobile device.

We’ll be keeping an ear out for suggested improvements to this feature, and we’re excited to see how our visitors are engaging with these large-print labels on the web and in the galleries!

In addition to launching the large-print label pages, we’ve added an accessibility link to our header and footer navigation across all our sites, where visitors can learn more about the growing list of access services that Cooper Hewitt offers alongside large-print label booklets.

Also published on Medium.