Melvyl Accessibility Testing

By Steve Toub, CDL Bibliographic Services Strategist

As part of our quality assurance process in the upgrade of Melvyl from ALEPH v.15 to ALEPH v.16, CDL requested the UCLA’s Disabilities and Computing Program to provide an accessibility audit of the Melvyl site. Many aspects of the Request site were also included in the review. The final report is now available at: [http://www.dcp.ucla.edu/melvylreport/report_index.htm].
CDL is pleased to confirm that although the out-of-the-box ALEPH interface had a number of accessibility issues, our implementation has turned our ALEPH-based system into one that is largely compliant with Section 508, the federal law related to web accessibility. Most of the issues raised by the accessibility audit were cosmetic usability suggestions or proposals that go above and beyond what is required by law.

Ex Libris has used JavaScript in the ALEPH product.  Although CDL has taken great pains to reduce the amount of JavaScript and to ensure that browsers without JavaScript can access all Melvyl functionality, a handful of problematic areas remain.  Investigation by CDL has confirmed that these problematic areas are controlled by ALEPH code that is not editable by CDL.  We will be reporting our findings to Ex Libris. 

CDL is committed to ensuring access to resources for all patrons; we are extremely grateful to the staff at UCLA’s Disabilities and Computing Program for the attention they gave in their thorough accessibility audit of Melvyl.