MERLOT ACCESSIBILITY STATEMENT
Commitment Statement
MERLOT's vision is to be a premiere online community where faculty, staff, and students fromaround the world share their learning materials and pedagogy. We strive to make our site fully
accessible for users with disabilities and to reduce barriers to delivering educational content toall our users. Our goal is to ensure that improvements we make allow users with disabilities tohave the same wonderful experience exploring our site as all users. We hope that you will enjoy
the new and exciting changes we have made to MERLOT. We are committed to accessibility as
an ongoing activity so we look forward to your feedback! Our site was last updated June 2019.

Compliance Status
Our Accessibility development work has focused on many different aspects of MERLOT. We
most intensely focused on the index.htm pages and the primary navigation pages:
materials.htm, members.htm, portfolios.htm, assignments.htm, comments.htm, andreviews.htm; however, we also brought many changes to all of the pages as we found issues tofix.
MERLOT used 5 different specifications to verify that the technical standards were met for thewebsite. MERLOT used the following for our accessibility development of MERLOT: WCAG 2.0. We looked at all 3 levels, but mostly levels A & AA.
 CSU Accessibility Guidelines, primarily based on WCAG 2.0
 HTML 5 standards
 CSS 3 standards Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.0Accessibility Features
In addition, MERLOT:
 Ensured that everything is keyboard navigable - Significant changes have been made toMERLOT so users without fine motor control or the ability to execute simultaneousactions may browse the website with ease. We have enabled keyboard navigation
throughout our pages.
 Eliminated the use of tables for layout purposes which cause accessible problems onpages we have redesigned (tiles, hitslists). It is an ongoing process for pages that stillrequire redesign (material detail page, member profile, wizards)
 Used ARIA, alt and title attributes clarify both static & dynamic content.

MERLOT ACCESSIBILITY STATEMENT





When a dialog is active, the focus is on the dialog and we only allow tabbing throughelements in that dialog
Informed users when a dynamic area is active and allowed navigation through elements as longas it’s active.

Color-contrast specs are met.
Confirmed that pages make sense when style sheets are removed (very important forscreen readers)
Each option and section in MERLOT provides a tool tip that explains what the entry
is, what is the expected input required and the format required.

Accessibility GapsMERLOT is not responsible for accessibility compliance of the Open Education Resource links
from www.merlot.org. Accessibility compliance stated in this document is focused solely on
www.merlot.org.

Product Usage Information for Users with Disabilities
Users of older versions of browsers will be informed that to optimize their experience on thewebsite, they should upgrade their browser. This is communicated with a message that reads,“For optimal performance of MERLOT functionality, use IE 11 or higher, Chrome 75 or higher,
Firefox 67 or higher, or Safari on mobile devices.”

Feedback Mechanism
MERLOT welcomes feedback regarding the accessibility of our website. If MERLOT users haveaccessibility-specific questions, need assistance or encounter accessibility problems with theMERLOT website, they can contact the MERLOT Webmaster at webmaster@merlot.org.

Additional Resources
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0
HTML 5 Standards
WAI –ARIA Over view
Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act
W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)