LibGuides: Humanities: Tampa Bay & Online Museums

The following online collections and galleries aim for World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 Level AA (WCAG 2.0 AA) as its web accessibility standard and Section 5-8 Web Accessibility Standards developed by the United States Access Board. Some apps and sites listed below are designed to assist with users who have visual or hearing impairment with items such as alt-text, ASL captioning, etc.

Accessible Online Art Collections for Visual and/or Hearing Impairment

de Young Museum San Francisco- Audio Guide Transcripts of Collection
Audio tours for most temporary, special exhibitions at both museums are available at exhibition entrances. For the online collection, online audio transcript is available with highlights of the collection.
Farnsworth Art Museum
Farnsworth Art Museum is committed to making the information on our website accessible to all visitors, including people with disabilities. We follow current best practices and strive to adhere to W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, Level AA.
The museum’s collection of approximately 15,000 works focuses on American art from the 18th century to the present, with a special emphasis on artists who have lived or worked in Maine.
The Frick Collection- Artworks with Audio Descriptions
The Acoustiguide Audio Tour, our random-access digital audio guide that offers recorded information about the masterpieces on view through a handheld listening device, is t-coil compatible. The system provides up to three hours of material in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish and is included in the price of admission. Transcripts are available on the website,
Guggenheim New York: ASL Videos of Artwork
Presented in American Sign Language (ASL) with open captioning, these videos discuss key artwork from Guggenheim Museum’s Thannhauser Collection.
Guggenheim New York: Verbal Descriptions from the Thannhauser Collection
This playlist presents descriptions and contextual information for six key artworks from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Thannhauser Collection, plus a history of the collection and a description of the gallery space that holds it. Learn more about the museum’s programs for visitors with disabilities at www.guggenheim.org/new-york/visit/…th-disabilities and about the Thannhauser Collection at www.guggenheim.org/thannhauser.
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Our efforts to create a site that adheres to best practices in accessible design and that is also generous and experimental in its accommodations for visitors with vision, hearing, or cognitive impairments have been supported by Sina Bahram, one of the museum community's leading accessibility consultants and advocates. Together, we have developed a series of projects that we hope will serve as a model for art museums hoping to reach and support members of the disability community.

One of the most exciting and groundbreaking of these initiatives is Coyote, a toolkit and project to create and publish visual descriptions of the images on this site. Our Coyote software, developed with Sina Bahram's team at Prime Access Consulting, is an open source tool that we are pleased to be able to share with the museum community. Here at the MCA it has been used by staff from across the museum to produce image descriptions that allow people who are blind or visually impaired to engage more fully with the visual arts.

The popularity of these image descriptions—previously available only to people equipped with screen readers—has encouraged us to share them with all site visitors. As of January 2018, an on/off toggle was added to the navigation. This allows a website visitor to turn on visual descriptions for many of the images on our site.
Museum of Fine Arts Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) is committed to facilitating the accessibility and usability of its website, https://www.mfa.org/, for all people with disabilities. The MFA will be implementing over time the relevant portions of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 Level AA (WCAG 2.0 AA) as its web accessibility standard, which will also bring the MFA into conformance with the Section 5-8 Web Accessibility Standards developed by the United States Access Board.
Whitney Museum of Art- ASL Vlogs
Whitney Video Blogs (vlogs) are original short videos featuring Deaf museum educators communicating in American Sign Language (ASL). The vlogs focus on topics in contemporary art or exhibitions on view at the Museum. Each vlog is produced by an integrated team consisting of a director/editor and Whitney educators who are Deaf, working with a cinematographer and interpretive media and education specialists who are hearing.

The goal of these vlogs is to increase cultural opportunities for Deaf and hard of hearing audiences and create a communications laboratory to expand the ASL vocabulary of contemporary art terms. We hope that these videos can serve as a model for other institutions to create original interpretive content that meets the learning needs of multiple audiences and engages visitors with disabilities in a collaborative creative process, highlighting the unique perspectives they bring to the cultural field.

Free Museum Passes!

With a public library, you can obtain free museum passes to the following Tampa Bay organizations:

Thanks to our partnerships with area museums, the Pinellas Public Library Cooperative is happy to offer FREE family admission to the following museums: Museum of Fine Arts, Florida Holocaust Museum, Great Explorations Children's Museum, Henry B. Plant Museum, Imagine Museum, Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, Dunedin History Museum, and the Tampa Bay History Center.

Click here to see Available Passes

How the museum pass works:

Each PPLC member library and its branches have two museum passes from each museum partner (except for the Henry B. Plant museum which has a total of 6 passes countywide).
Passes are available for checkout on a first-come, first-served basis. Passes are not renewable or holdable.
You may check the availability of passes by contacting your library's circulation staff or by searching the PPLC online catalog.
Only one pass per museum may be checked out at a time. Checkout by adult cardholders only.
Admission is valid for up to 2 adults, and 3 children under the age of 18, in the same household.
Each pass is valid for one visit within the 7-day loan period. Passes are checked out for a full 7-day period.
Present the receipt from the library to museum staff upon entry. The museum will retain your receipt.
Passes are not available to reciprocal borrowers.