LibGuides: Humanities: Tampa Bay & Online Museums

Museum Collections

Free Local Museum Passes for PPLC Patrons

Members of the Pinellas Public Library Cooperative can check out museum passes for the following institutions at any PPLC locations (Including the West Community Library @ SPC Gibbs, East Community Library @ SPC Clearwater, and the Seminole Public Library at SPC Seminole:

The Collection on Palmetto
Dunedin Fine Art Center’s Children’s Museum
Dunedin History Museum (closed Mondays-Friday for summer camps. Closed August 8 – September 6, 2025 for renovation)
Florida CraftArt
The Florida Holocaust Museum (closed for construction through September 9, 2025)
Glazer Children’s Museum
Great Explorations Children’s Museum
Henry B. Plant Museum
Imagine Museum
Leepa Rattner Museum of Art
Museum of Fine Arts
Safety Harbor Museum & Cultural Center
Safford House Museum
Tampa Bay History Center
Tarpon Springs Heritage Museum

Review the PPLC Museum Pass Policies and check out a museum pass today.

Virtual Museum Tours Beyond Tampa Bay

Searching Google Arts & Culture

Accessible Online Art Collections for Visual and/or Hearing Impairment

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.

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.