One of the things we love about the internet is the way it can give us access to things we would never be able to see or experience without it. Find a Grave® is a perfect example. Through the help of other members of the Find a Grave community, we can see and read the gravestones of people who live in places all over the world from the comfort of our own homes. All because of you. Behind the scenes our team is making improvements and we hope they help you as you work on the site. We’d like to share more information about these updates, including:
- Updates to help the site be more accessible to all users
- Community Rules
- Brand guidelines for Find a Grave
Updates for site accessibility
Some recent updates are intended to help the site be more accessible for all users and you may have noticed some of those already–changes in colors, different outlines for selected fields, different labeling of fields and more. Many of the changes you won’t have noticed unless you are using a screen reader or other tools designed to make websites more accessible.
One recent update we’ve been working on is an addition to our list pages. Screen readers and other accessibility tools struggle to make sense of ‘infinite scroll’ lists, lists that automatically load more items as you scroll, like those on Find a Grave. To help with this, we’ve added Settings to our search lists that allow you to view the results page by page or to use infinite scroll. Also included is the option to view the search results in a condensed list.
Community Rules
Another recent update we’d like to point to is an update to our Community Rules. Ancestry has one set of community rules for their family of sites and we’ve updated our site to link to these rules rather than have our own. The Find a Grave community does amazing work together and the Community Rules can help by clarifying boundaries and expectations to avoid abuse and hard feelings. You can find the link to the Community Rules at the bottom of our homepage. You can read these rules in a variety of languages by selecting Language in the upper right corner. As you scroll down on the page, you’ll notice a couple of additional rules that apply specifically to Find a Grave. These have to do with suggesting edits and messaging to help our community work together to update memorials, and with ensuring sensitivity for the diverse cultural meanings of burial grounds and cemeteries and obtaining permission before adding information from them to Find a Grave.
Brand Guidelines
The third update has to do with our brand guidelines for the site. Find a Grave has been around for nearly 30 years and the site name represents our incredible community and the work you accomplish together on the site daily. Find a Grave is quite literally what people are doing when they come and search for a grave on the site and what you do when you visit cemeteries to photograph graves and transcribe them into memorials. Our brand guidelines for Find a Grave, provide logos and a style guide to use when sharing information about the site. We ask that when referencing the site, you use the full name with capital letters for the ‘Find’ and ‘Grave’ and a lowercase ‘a.’ We avoid using acronyms for the site name and instead use Find a Grave. If you need to use an acronym, please use FG.
Thanks for your input as we’ve made these updates. Our sincere thanks to the community for all your time, hard work, and efforts while sharing your contributions for this vital work. You have made Find a Grave what it is today and should be proud of all you are accomplishing together.