Foo | Bar
The weekends have piled up that I've been tinkering with this website. The initial impetus was my frustration with the size and cludgeyness of WordPress. It's just far more than I want to deal with to maintain a basic blog / portfolio site. However, it has meant a meandering path of documentation guides for technologies that I might have been aware of, but not used.
During my first foray into web development, in 2008, things were a bit simpler. I managed, with little knowledge of anything, to cobble together a basic PHP template and CSS for the Museum site running on Drupal. By the time the Museum moved to WordPress I was providing design direction for the template, but I wasn't building it.
Flash forward to present day and I'm trying to navigate jamstacks with a basic understanding of CSS and HTML, with little to no programming knowledge. And much to my frustration tutorials with names akin to "building your 11ty site in 20 quick and easy steps!" often seem to begin at a base level of knowledge that is beyond mine. Obviously, I communicate with developers, I'm aware of most of the technologies on a high level, but I've found myself opening documentation sites like nesting dolls, attempting to find the definition for acronym after acronym.
And thus I find myself staring at {foo | bar} for what seemed like the 11ty-billionth time. What is 'foo' and what have I been missing here? And as soon as the results page loaded after my search for "what does foo mean in programming?" I felt like a Looney Toons character who has just made the realization that they are in face a dunce and their head transforms into that of jackass. Foo | bar, used as a placeholder, referencing the military slang FUBAR. So damn obvious now, I could only laugh at myself.
Which brings me to the bigger thought, and my means of erasing hours, days, weekends, of frustration. I work in an environment of highly educated people thinking big. Reflecting on history and culture in broad sweeping strokes, but also deeply in the weeds of years of art historical practice, study, and theory. Though we attempt to present material in our galleries at an eighth grade reading level (deemed by studies to roughly be the average reading level of American adults), we are often still missing those really basic building blocks.
All of the code documentation I've found is written at a far lower reading level than I'm capable of comprehending. But if jargon, acronyms, and inside references abound, I might easily be able to read it, but how likely am I to understand it on a deeper level. And this is where museums, particularly art museums, seem to struggle. We can spend hours in a meeting debating how to present the title of an artwork on a label next to it, whether it needs to be in italics, or not. A proper title is in bold italics, obviously, but if it's descriptive it only needs to be bold. Without that distinction, well, people just won't know which object has been given a title by it's maker and which one's we've decided to give a title to. One that merely describes the object in a general sense. But in the end is that worthwhile if the visitor doesn't know that we have this internal distinction? How many visitors notice that some titles are italic and some aren't? Those that do, are they more confused, curiously wondering, what's the deal with this museum, they can't decide between italics and normal? But perhaps, there are those visitors, often with the secret insider knowledge bestowed upon those who work in the fields more often than not, who peruse our galleries and can decipher this system with ease.
And this isn't a hypothetical. I sat in those meetings. I understand this in the academic, philosophical sense, and argued against what I perceive to be antagonistic to the visitor methodology. But my foray into deeper web dev has given me a real sense of that from the non-philosophical side of the argument. A sense of what it actually feels like to confront those barrier to access that are invisible to the uninitiated. The title / label issue is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to visitor-centric issues and accessibility in museums. Though I've considered myself an advocate for greater access, this was a good a-ha moment for me to reset my humility and empathy, having experienced the struggle to comprehend a thing in a real and direct way.