Spring 2025

PastPerfect Online has a very big 2025 planned and we’re excited for you to join us! One major focus for our team over the past few months has been improving web accessibility. We will share a more in-depth announcement when everything is fully unveiled this summer but you can keep reading for a sneak peek of what’s to come!

Over the winter, external testing was performed on PastPerfect Online to evaluate how our existing site structure meets accessibility standards and where we could improve. The feedback led to many changes with the goal of benefitting anyone who uses your site, no matter what technology they use to browse and research.

When we officially announce the changes have been rolled out, you should take the time to closely review your site. Our team will match these new and updated features to each organization’s existing design as best as possible, but please reach out if you see anything that you have questions about. We will begin reaching out to sites with heavy customizations in the coming weeks for a more in-depth discussion to provide ample time to adjust before the new HTML and CSS is live.

Some of the bigger changes on the way include:

On smaller screens like mobile devices, a new “hamburger” menu has been added to save space without losing any of the navigation options.

The default help text that appears on each search page has been expanded upon to add more tips right where your web visitors need it most. Random Images now has its own help text as well! Any customized help text that has been added through the Interface Management Site (IMS) will not be changed and will continue to display as-is.

Forms have been moved from opening in a small, separate window to opening in an overlay that appears on the current page.

Large images are now front and center on Random Images and individual record pages, instead of only being visible after clicking on a thumbnail.

When search results are set to sort by relevance, additional text provides that context to researchers.

While these changes affect the structure of PPO, there are quite a few things that you control! Some of the biggest choices that can make an organization’s site inaccessible are insufficient color contrast, non-descriptive alt text for images, and a lack of captions or alternative content for multimedia. These topics are much bigger than we can fit in a single newsletter, but the following questions are a good place to start:

Is the color of your text easy to read against the background, or are the colors too similar?

Think about regular text, hyperlinks, and buttons. Some websites remove the underline from hyperlinks for stylistic reasons, but this makes the link difficult to distinguish from the rest of the text based on color alone.

Ensuring good contrast makes a significant difference for someone with low vision or colorblindness, as well as someone using their cellphone while outside in direct sunlight.

Do your images have alt text that describes the image to someone who can’t see it?

Web visitors who use screen readers due to low vision or blindness rely on alt text to describe the content of images. This text is also displayed when an image can’t be loaded, providing the description to anyone visiting the site.

PastPerfect Online uses your data to automatically populate the alt text for an image. For images attached to People Biography and Creator records, the image’s Caption field is used. If the Caption is not available, the Name field from the Person or Creator record is used instead. In the four catalogs (Object, Photo, Archive, and Library), the Caption field from the Image Metadata is used. If the Caption is not available, the Title field from the catalog record will be used. If Title is not available, the Object Name field from the catalog record will be used. Finally, if the Object Name is not available, the generic text of “Collection Item” will be used as the alt text.

When sharing supplemental media files, have you provided alternate ways to consume that media?

For example, information that is only provided via audio, like a recorded oral history interview, is essentially nonexistent for someone who is d/Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing, or someone with an auditory processing disorder. Likewise, someone who is in a quiet space where they can’t turn up the volume or may not have functioning speakers available to them will miss out. Adding captions to the video and making a separate transcript available allows all visitors to interact with your content in the way that works best for them. 

Moving forward, our team will run a quick check with automated tools to look for some of the more common issues, like misused heading elements and insufficient color contrast whenever you request we make changes to your site design for you. We’ll let you know about any changes we’ve made to resolve these issues and point out other changes you may want to consider.

Remember that sharing your collections online isn’t an end point, it’s a constant journey! A good practice is to periodically review your site from a visitor’s perspective, thinking carefully about both the design and the content you have available. Check the images, data, and any multimedia you are sharing: Is it descriptive and informative? Do the links in your site’s header, footer, and any other custom content bring visitors to the correct page, or are they outdated or no longer functioning?

There are many great resources online that provide in-depth guidance on everything related to web accessibility! We’ll share more as we update our documentation, but here are a few to help you get started:

• Contrast Checker and Link Contrast Checker by WebAIM
• WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool by WebAIM
• Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List by W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative

The PastPerfect Online team is currently hard at work updating our User Guide, Knowledge Base, and other documentation. These updated resources will be available once the changes are live on all sites. A VPAT WCAG Edition will also be available upon request at that time. Updated training videos are a bigger project and will be slowly rolled out beginning later this year.

If you have concerns about this topic in general or about how these changes relate to your PastPerfect Online site, please reach out to us at pposupport@museumsoftware.com so we can discuss them further.

We are asking each of our staff to choose a favorite item from one of the many online collections. This artifact was selected from the online collection of the Chestnut Hill Conservancy by Madeline because:

“Fresh off a Super Bowl win, I wanted to pick an item from my city! I chose this ~50 year old drawing from the Chestnut Hill Conservancy’s online collection. It resonated with me that the act of little work doodles is a timeless feature in the life of an office creative. There’s a small chance I may be in the middle of drawing one of my own the next time you reach me on the reception line!”

Featured Sites

Museum of Natural and Cultural History

DuPage County Historical Museum

GridHeritage

View more PastPerfect Online sites on our List of Collections page.

If your site is not listed and you would like to be, please let us know by sending an email with your organization name to pposupport@museumsoftware.com.