Museums and the “Digital Curb Cut”

The Library of Congress has the distinction of being the largest library in the world and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. The vast collection contains over 130 million items, and its primary role since its inception in 1880 has been to serve the legislative needs of Congress. Yet, today this venerable institution is also largely regarded as the defacto national library for the American people. Irene Chambers, Head of Interpretive Programs (IPO) at the Library of Congress, clarified that while Congress remains the primary institutional audience, the expanding interpretive programs are designed to serve the general public. Chambers noted that the Library of Congress is a very complex institution, not unlike the Smithsonian. Yet, the Library must serve the needs of multiple audiences as diverse as Congress, the Supreme Court, first graders and scholars. It should be noted that the interpretation programs are almost exclusively privately funded, as only two exhibitions in the past 12 years have been funded directly by the Library of Congress, according to Chambers.

In 2004, the Library of Congress published a four year strategic plan that entails “moving the library out more broadly and in more deeply” in order to make its “vast collections more relevant and accessible” to American citizens. Digital content figures prominently in the plan to expand the Library’s audience, as goal two of eighteen prescribed:

“Provide maximum access and facilitate effective use of the collections by congress and other customers; provide multiple search and access methods to support the needs of a diverse and distributed customer population.” (Library of Congress, 2003)

As a result, the Library of Congress has undertaken a number of ambitious projects to digitize their collections and make them available to anyone with Internet access. For example, the “American Memory” project is a one of a kind resource for teachers, kids, families, librarians and researchers. Thematic collections of sheet music, audio recordings, videos, maps and photos have been published in a searchable online database to facilitate learning about various aspects of American history and culture.

The online exhibit “Churchill and the Great Republic,” produced by Irene Chambers and Betsy Nahum-Miller, the Online Exhibit Director, is an outstanding example of educational multimedia designed to take advantage of the experiential richness digital media can provide (http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/churchill/interactive/). The Flash-based online program, developed by Terra Incognita of Austin, Texas in 2005, was designed to supplement the physical exhibition that was jointly developed by the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, England and the Library of Congress. In addition to its display at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, the exhibit traveled in 2004 and 2005 to the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum and Library in Grand Rapids, Michigan and the Durham Western Heritage Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. The exhibition was privately-funded by John W. Kluge and the Annenberg Foundation. It is interesting to note that John W. Kluge, the primary sponsor of the exhibition, was an intelligence officer for the United States during World War II. As a German immigrant, Churchill’s relations with the United States during the war held particular significance to Kluge based on his homeland, ethnicity and military service.

Published nearly forty years after the death of Winston Churchill, the exhibition featured letters, documents, photos, maps, newspaper clippings and artifacts drawn from both collections and never presented together prior to this exhibition. Recorded speeches, video clips and original drafts bring the career of Churchill to life, particularly for younger viewers who do not have a physical or auditory reference for this important historical figure. The presence of the curator, Daun van Ee, was added to the online exhibit through audio prompts that guide the visitor through the collection (see Figure 15). Van Ee also provides a short audio introduction to the various pathways available to explore the rich-media content. The audio guide helps create the impression of a personalized tour of the exhibit for online visitors, and the use of audio effectively aids persons with low vision, reading disabilities and attention disorders in accessing the rich content of the exhibition. For example, the audio introduction is also animated to highlight the features of the program while they are discussed. To keep the focus on the feature discussed, the background and all other elements are faded to black temporarily (see Figure 16).

However, this elegant solution aids some audiences and excludes others, most notably the deaf and hard of hearing. Ideally, a running transcript of the audio should be included on screen for persons with hearing impairments, those using devices without audio, or individuals accessing the program in a quiet environment, such as a library. Similarly, the audio that plays automatically when entering the online exhibition should be controlled by the online visitor and also captioned. There is no reference on the screen to indicate the fascinating context of this recording, which happens to be Churchill’s recital of a timely quote from the Longfellow poem “The Building of the Ship,” which was included in a letter from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Winston Churchill in 1941. Additionally, audio that plays automatically may conflict with the spoken output of a screen reader, increasing the difficulty of use for persons with visual impairments. It should also be remembered that visitors who have their audio turned off, or are viewing the site on a device without sound capabilities, would not be aware that the audio was playing unless audio controls and/or captions were present. Thus, providing redundant modalities for media content provides more information for all visitors to select how they want to experience the content.

The design and format of the program has been highly praised by reviewers and was honored as the Design Interact site of the week in August, 2005.

Over time, a tried-and-true architecture for presenting exhibition content on the Web, has emerged. Although this project takes advantage of this well-tested format, it stands out from the norm with a rich, grid-based visual structure, a print sensibility and a cross-connection of content that allows for a thorough understanding of the subject. (Design Interact, 2005)

Additionally, the American Association of Museums recognized “Churchill and the Great Republic” in 2006 and presented the Library of Congress with the Silver Muse award. The site was also nominated for the Museums and the Web 2006 Best of the Web awards.

In the past, online exhibitions produced by the Library of Congress closely replicated the linear, physical exhibition and served more as a case-by-case documentation of the ephemeral gallery experience than a unique, media-enabled encounter. Chambers indicated that one goal of the Churchill online exhibit was to provide a non-linear experience that allows multiple ways to navigate through the nine themes and 214 objects presented. The content is organized into three sections: timeline, themes and objects. Yet, the sections are intricately linked and cross-referenced to provide deeper and alternate methods to explore the themes and objects in context. For example, the objects are visually placed in reference to world events and important dates in Churchill’s life in the timeline (see Figure 17). The visitor can also choose to “see objects from this period” from the timeline. From the objects screen, the visitor can select the formats of pertinent objects including letters and telegrams, notes and memoranda, and personal documents among many more options and sort them by an easy to use, drag-able timeline control (see Figure 18).

When viewing individual objects, the visitor can zoom in on the image to view details in high resolution (see Figure 19). This is an extremely useful capacity of Flash that cannot be easily accomplished in HTML pages. Persons with impaired but useful eyesight can zoom in on the details almost infinitely, enabling customizable views for a better understanding of the content. However, the content remains image-based; the text of the scanned documents cannot be accessed by screen-readers or search-engines without a text-based transcript. However, text transcriptions were provided for less complicated documents, most notably personal correspondence. Winston Churchill’s handwritten letter to Clementine Hozier, who later became his wife, is much easier for all persons to understand with the aid of the text transcript (see Figure 20), as his handwriting is rather difficult to decipher with perfect vision.

Three videos are also included in the exhibition, and all audiences would benefit from captions, as the audio is often hard to comprehend (see Figure 21). While the deteriorated quality of the footage is largely due to the videos having been filmed more than 50 years ago, the ability to enlarge the small video clips would enable general audiences as well as those with visual impairment to perceive the content of the videos more clearly.

The paths of discovery offered by “Churchill and the Great Republic” are indicative of the second generation of online, interactive media published by museums, as suggested by Fiona Cameron, Research Fellow, Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies at the Centre for Cultural Research (CCR) at the University of Western Sydney: “Increasingly, museum professionals are moving beyond technology-driven reasoning to entertain new ways of conceptualizing both collections and information” (Cameron, 2003, p. 325). In contrast to the fixed sequence and thematic narratives of the first generation, the second generation provides the visitor with choices and alternative pathways while emphasizing relationships in a non-hierarchical format. Cameron (2003) theorized:

Knowledge has the potential to become customizable rather than remain tethered to a single fixed standard… For the first time, collections information is technologically liberated from linear hierarchical narratives and a linear spatial structure so familiar in physical exhibitions environment. (p. 325)

The third generation of interactive media produced by cultural institutions, according to Cameron, will acknowledge the wide diversity of online visitors and tailor the experience to their interests and needs. This level of customization of both content and presentation will greatly enhance accessibility for multimedia by providing the online visitor with the ability to select from many options including: the size of type presented, contrast settings, layout formats, and redundant modalities, including captions or transcripts for audio and video content.

While most of these options have not been implemented in the Churchill interactive, the media-rich content is presented through a graphically sophisticated, yet extremely easy-to-use interface. For example, the site uses clear, easy to understand language in the object descriptions and the links to content sections; the controls are intuitive and provide graphical feedback in response to user requests; the interface is consistent and uncluttered despite the wealth of information presented on screens like the interactive timeline.

Bart Marable, Creative Director for Terra Incognita, offered his insights into the development of the Churchill project. Marable explained that there are often competing expectations in the development of multimedia for museums: the presentation of a compelling and engaging story, and the development of an accessible digital product. In the museum industry, the budgets for multimedia are not large, and developers focused on this industry are a “special breed of company” that must have an interest and passion for cultural education, according to Marable (personal communication, December 11, 2006). The promises of accessibility are very often not practical, in his estimation, and require extra development time and additional funding that is usually not available. In short, what is possible is not always practical.

The Churchill project was programmed in Macromedia Flash (now Adobe) version 7, and development took one year to complete. Marable likened Flash technology to a “walled garden,” in which content cannot easily be exposed to other technologies and made readable by screen readers or other assistive technologies designed to aid persons with disabilities. Furthermore, the interactive timelines were intricately designed and contained a number of visual nuances that could not be programmatically developed. Thus, no attempt was made to make the Flash version of the project accessible. It would be incredibly time consuming to retrofit the now complete project to provide accessibility within the Flash authoring environment. If Flash accessibility had been a requirement from the start, the project most likely would have been programmed differently. Marable provided an example of a current project in which the content is entirely database-driven and programmatically determined. In this case, it will be much easier to separate content from presentation at the code level within Flash. Thus, accessibility properties, including logical tab orders, resizing or controlling the display of content, and the exposure of the content to screen readers, could be automated through the use of standard page templates. Marable instructed that the nature of this project requires that content will change and be added frequently, in contrast to the Churchill project that was designed to digitally encapsulate the scholarship of an unchanging physical exhibition.

Instead, accessibility of “Churchill and the Great Republic” was provided through a text-only version of the interactive. From the initial start screen, the online visitor is provided with two pathways: the choice of following a list of links to the text-only site, or entering the interactive exhibition (see Figure 22). Contractually, compliance with Section 508 was a requirement, but no specifics were provided on how accessibility should be achieved. Thus, the Library of Congress and Terra Incognita agreed that the text-only version must be standards-compliant and automated accessibility testing was conducted on the alternate version only. The Library of Congress and the developer shared responsibility for accessibility testing. Usability testing of the Flash version was managed internally by the developer and did not include disabled persons, as the survey results presented in the previous chapter indicated are typical of both the museum and development communities.

The decision to “double build” the site also took into account the unchanging nature of the program, as it was designed to complement and document a physical exhibition. The text in the alternative version could be kept up to date indefinitely and did not require a database to synchronize the two versions. Marable did, however, question whether double building is the best use of resources, as extra time and money are involved. Would that money and creative energy be better spent developing richer interactive content? In the end, the effort was rationalized not only to address the need for Section 508 compliance but also to allow for printable pages and cataloguing by search engines.

Recently, there has been much discussion on accessibility blogs and discussion lists about the use of alternative text-only sites for Flash interactive programs. One contributor reasoned:

Text-only websites are not suited to all users with impairments. Although they are often ideal for users who are blind and use a screen reader, accessibility goes far beyond this user group…This all or nothing approach is easy, but fails to take into account that users are infinitely variable combinations of abilities and impairments. It encourages designers to do whatever they like in the “regular” version, safe in the knowledge that the text only version provides for people who cannot use it. The result is often two minority versions, each of which is suitable for only a small percentage of the user population. (Spollen, n.d.)

Thus, individuals who are colorblind, partially-sighted, deaf, dyslexic, or cannot use a mouse are not only excluded from the inaccessible Flash version but are not well served by the text-only version either. Furthermore, the creation of separate sites for disabled persons has been perceived as discriminatory, as it further marginalizes and segregates persons with disabilities.

“Churchill and the Great Republic” was developed in Flash 7, and significant improvements have been made to the authoring environment in Flash 8 to aid in the production of accessible digital content. With less effort by the programmer, Flash content can be either hidden or exposed to screen readers and tab ordering for keyboard navigation has also been simplified. However, there is still a learning curve for developers, as many are not yet aware of how to use these new features to make accessible Flash content. Perhaps even more important, they are not required by their clients to do so. In the absence of a contractual obligation to provide accessibility for complex multimedia projects, there is little reason for developers to learn how to better address accessibility in Flash interactive programs.

Betsy Nahum-Miller, the Online Exhibit Director, indicated that the Library of Congress just adopted a policy for accessible multimedia in 2006. While Nahum-Miller suggested that the policy is general in nature, it does indicate that accessibility for multimedia is becoming a larger priority for cultural institutions. The Library of Congress has already demonstrated their commitment to accessibility through their support of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS). The program “That All May Read” is a free library program supported by the Library of Congress that provides talking books and Braille transcription to citizens in the United States by postage-free mail. The Library of Congress makes explicit their support for persons with disabilities on the accessibility page of their web site. Disabled visitors to the physical location of the Library of Congress are provided with an astounding number of services and assistive technologies to provide them with access to the physical collection and the facilities where they are housed. It may only be a matter of time before the Library of Congress realizes their goals for accessibility and directs the rich capabilities of multimedia towards reaching a more diverse public through the Internet.