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American Museum of Natural History

Mugo partner since 2011

The American Museum of Natural History is a cultural icon with an award-winning digital presence.

 

Mugo has worked with the American Museum of Natural History since 2011. We develop and maintain all aspects of the website code, provide support on server management, coordinate features with editorial and science teams, and work on several website properties, including their main website.

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Mobile view of the Chinook Arch website, with the catalogue search highlighted

Making keyboard navigation more accessible with JavaScript ‘focus traps’

Tabbing through a web page can be a frustrating experience. The user tabs to access a menu, but with the keyboard's next tap, they’ve moved on to another page element and have to retrace their steps to access the desired content.

For users who rely on keyboard navigation, this can be a major accessibility roadblock. And for other site visitors, it’s just poor UX.

Fortunately, you can implement a fairly straightforward function in JavaScript called a “focus trap” to ensure users don’t leave the page area they’re in without intending to do so.

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a gear labeled CMS surrounded by an array of cleaning tools

Cleaning up unused CSS and JS files from WordPress pages

WordPress can be a great option for easy website development, but because of the rapid evolution of the CMS, it can lead to inefficient code and slow loading pages. We'll show you how to clean up unused CSS and JS from pages to improve site-wide performance. 

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illustration of a reCAPTCHA screen, withe question marks in place of text, and robots obscuring the photos for identification.

Making Google reCAPTCHA v2 play nice with browser form validation

CAPTCHA is an essential need on online forms, but to be blunt, the UX sucks. Without the implementation tips (helpfully detailed below), Google’s otherwise reliable reCAPTCHA service implemented “as-is” doesn’t actually provide any browser validation. The user will have to wait for it to make a time-consuming round trip to the server. It’s a problem for anyone and becomes compounded for users with accessibility needs.

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a woman in a wheelchair using a computer superimposed over different digital windows

Creating accessible links to help users discover your site’s content treasures

Links are among a website's most valuable components. They connect (that’s what the word “link” means, after all) different pages and resources, helping site visitors find the content they are looking for. Well-planned and formatted links are like a detailed, intuitive treasure map that sends visitors to the right destination.

Links are also critical for making your website accessible to visitors with visual or other impairments. A link that lacks important information can prevent some visitors from accessing all the treasures a website holds. Or even worse, it can send users to completely undesirable content and discourage them from exploring all your site has to offer.

In this post, I’ll discuss how to present links in various contexts, clearly explaining how they can create and inform powerful relationships between different pages and assets.

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