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Jun 25, 2026

Public Explore hub: exhibitions, language and accessibility

The Explore page at /explore is the public, no-login front door to everything a visitor can do with the collection. It is part of the heratio#1211 "every museum for everyone - universal multilingual access" North Star. This page explains the two visitor-facing capabilities added in the first increment: discovering the exhibitions (with their 3D walkthroughs) and setting language + reading-comfort preferences that are remembered across visits.

What the Explore hub shows

/explore is a single, jurisdiction-neutral landing page. Each card only appears when the feature behind it is installed, so the grid is always live - there are never dead links. Cards include:

  • Explore the exhibitions -> /exhibitions. Lists every public exhibition space, each with its 3D walkthrough, wayfinding floor plan and printable catalogue. This is the entry point to the digital twin.
  • What's on -> /whats-on. Upcoming and live virtual openings across every exhibition space, with join / RSVP.
  • This collection at a glance, Ask the collection, Read a record in your language, Languages of this collection, Race against loss, Reconstructions gallery, Content Credentials, System map, and the Open data graph / Open data and APIs developer surfaces.

Choosing a language and reading comfort

At the top of the hub is a small panel - "Make this collection easier to use" - with two controls. Both are remembered on the device (browser session plus a 1-year cookie), need no account, and work without JavaScript (they are real forms that submit and redirect back).

Reading language

The Reading language picker lets a visitor choose the language they want records presented in. The original record text always stays authoritative; machine translation (clearly labelled) is provided via the AHG AI gateway. The chosen language is applied site-wide by the existing locale layer.

Tip: language can also be switched from the culture switcher in the site navigation. Both routes persist the same way, so the choice sticks.

Reading comfort (accessibility)

The Reading comfort control offers three independent on/off preferences:

Preference Body class Effect
High contrast a11y-high-contrast Stronger foreground/background contrast
Larger text a11y-larger-text Increased base font size
Reduce motion a11y-reduced-motion Suppresses non-essential animation

When a visitor ticks a preference it is saved immediately and applied across the whole site (every page, including record and exhibition pages), not just on the hub. With JavaScript the change applies instantly with no reload; without JavaScript the form submit saves the choice and returns the visitor to the page they were on with the preference already applied.

The theme styles the three body classes above. An institution can extend or override that styling in its own theme layer without touching this control.

How persistence works (for operators)

  • Language is handled by the existing SetLocale middleware and the /set-locale and /reading-language endpoints (session + 1-year locale / ahg_reading_language cookies). This increment did not change it.
  • Accessibility is handled by the AccessibilityPreferences middleware and the POST /accessibility-preferences endpoint (accessibility.preferences.set). It stores a validated subset of high-contrast,larger-text,reduced-motion in the session and a 1-year ahg_a11y_prefs cookie. The middleware shares the resolved body-class string to views and injects a tiny applier script so the classes land on <body> on every page. Unknown / hand-edited tokens are dropped; an empty submission clears the preference.

Everything is fail-soft: zero exhibitions still renders the hub, a garbage cookie resolves to "no preference", a non-HTML response is left untouched, and no path ever returns a 500.

Follow-ups (deferred from the first increment)

  • Full per-exhibition multilingual content translation (labels, captions).
  • A dedicated /museums vanity route.
  • A formal screen-reader / WCAG conformance audit of the hub and walkthroughs.
  • A persistent global header affordance for the language + comfort controls (currently surfaced on the hub; the site nav already carries the language switcher).