Website Accessibility for MCAChicago.org

Client: MCA Chicago
Date: February 2015 through September 2016
Services: WCAG Audits, Spot Checks, Emerging Technologies, Visual Description
A desktop browser window open to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago homepage. The design is clean and minimalist, dominated by a huge black "MCA" graphic across the top left and center. On the left side is a vertical navigation menu with the links Visit, Calendar, Exhibitions, Programs, Collection, Learn, Publications, Support, About, Buy Tickets, and Shop. Across the upper-right area are museum details, including "OPEN TODAY 10 am-5 pm," address information, ticket and membership links, and a search option. Below the large logo is a row of event cards with blue category labels like "TODAY," "THIS WEEK," and "NEXT WEEK," listing exhibitions, screenings, talks, and dates. Near the bottom, a large blue underlined heading reads "Current Exhibitions," followed by partially visible exhibition image thumbnails.

PAC worked with MCA Chicago and Tomas Celizna Studio on MCAChicago.org’s redesign, providing accessibility training, design and development support, a WCAG 2.0 evaluation, and the Coyote Project workflow that enabled visual descriptions for thousands of images and a public description layer.

Media

A screenshot of the Museum of Contemporary Art's website, shown inside a desktop browser window. A left sidebar menu lists the navigation items Visit, Calendar, Exhibitions, Programs, Collection, Learn, Publications, Support, About, Host an Event, Buy Tickets, Marisol, and Shop. Across the top of the main content area are decade filters including 2010s, 2000s, 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, and 1960s, with the year "2019" displayed prominently. The page shows a grid of exhibition cards with thumbnail images, titles, artists, and dates, including "Groundings," "Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera," "Atrium Project: Federico Herrero," "Heaven and Earth: Alexander Calder and Jeff Koons," and "A Body Measured Against the Earth." Several blue-highlighted image-description labels appear above artworks. Near the lower center, an accessibility popup is open with blue text headings "SHORT" and "LONG," with a visual description of a black-and-white photograph mounted on a wooden board.

Project Description

PAC worked with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Tomas Celizna Studio from the beginning of MCA’s website redesign process, helping ensure accessibility was considered during strategy and design rather than introduced only after development. PAC trained MCA staff and developers on accessible design and coding practices, supported the team through the design and implementation process, and later conducted a full WCAG 2.0 evaluation of MCAChicago.org.

A major part of this work was the development of the Coyote Project, which supported the creation and publication of visual descriptions for thousands of images across the MCA website. Rather than treating image description as a separate task after launch, PAC and MCA worked to embed it into the museum’s broader digital content workflow.

PAC’s collaboration with MCA continued well after the website launched. We supported the team in addressing issues identified through the evaluation, refining implementation details, and continuing to develop Coyote as both a practical tool and a broader model for visual description at scale.

Initially, MCA’s image descriptions were primarily available to people using screen readers. As interest in the descriptions grew, PAC worked with MCA to make them available more broadly. In January 2018, MCA launched a visual description layer that allowed website visitors to turn on descriptions and read them directly on the site. This helped reposition visual description as valuable interpretive content for all visitors, not only as access metadata hidden behind the interface.