We designed and built a fun learning experience to bring the Bayeux Tapestry to more people during its visit to the UK and beyond.
The Bayeux Tapestry has returned to England for the first time since it was made, nearly a thousand years ago. It went on display at the British Museum on September 10th, and tickets for the first four months of the run sold out the day after they went on sale.
To widen access and help people explore the Tapestry in more detail, the British Museum commissioned us to create an interactive online experience, which will allow more people to experience this exceptional piece of British and French history.
The result of this project is The Bayeux Tapestry Online Experience, a free interactive experience that you can use to explore the full length of the Tapestry in close detail.
Presenting a 70-metre story on any screen
The source image of the Tapestry is 482,096 pixels wide by 5,550 pixels high, around 2.7 billion pixels in total. So it can work across any screen size or device type, we broke it down into a deep-zoom tile set, converted it to WebP and served it through the Museum's own image infrastructure, so it’s fast and flexible.
People can pan and zoom the whole embroidery freely, down to the level of individual stitches, and open any of more than 240 hotspots that catch their eye. Hotspots are grouped into seven themes; People, Places, Daily life, Design & making, Latin, Warfare & power, and Animals & nature, and can be filtered so anyone following a single thread can hide the rest. All 58 scenes and 13 sections are navigable from a timeline of the whole work, so nobody gets lost.
The British Museum created the content for users aged 11+ so it can serve as a useful educational resource. It’s all designed to let users spot details they might miss in person, and unpacks the story in more detail for those who want to know more.
A tool for widening access
The British Museum wanted the exhibition to extend far beyond the room it sits in, and beyond the ten months it is here, supporting learners, schools and the wider public. With tickets in high demand, and not everyone able to make the trip, taking the Bayeux Tapestry online offered a way to radically expand access to this historic object and its story.
To ensure everyone was able to access and use the experience, accessibility was designed in from the start rather than checked at the end. It is built to WCAG 2.2 AA standards, works by keyboard throughout, and carries written descriptions of the scenes so that someone using a screen reader can follow what is happening.
This is exactly the kind of project we love, delivering a crucial piece of compelling interactive design, and helping one of our highest-profile clients make a hugely significant piece of history more accessible for a wider audience. We’ll leave the final word to the British Museum themselves. Alison Bean, the Website Product Manager, had this to say about the project:
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“Numiko have been a great partner in realising our ambition to make the Tapestry accessible for all, whether they’re young or just young at heart.”
