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MERLOT Enhancements
MERLOT is continually striving to update the website with enhancements and bug fixes to make your experience on the site easier. Some of the enhancements and fixes so far in 2009 include:
- Translation can now be done on the MERLOT site and a user has the ability to view materials in the translated language. Simply go to the left side of the footer on the MERLOT site and click the English link. You will get a pop up with over 30 different languages to translate the pages. For more information, go to http://taste.merlot.org/Language.html
For more information on language and translation in MERLOT, visit http://taste.merlot.org/Language.html
- A text editor was added to the Description field of the Contribute Material wizard. This will allow users to insert special characters and hypertext links into their descriptions. A counter was also added to identify the character limit in the text field while typing.
- Over 500 material links were updated in the repository.
- Keywords can now be added to better describe a material when it is added to MERLOT and those words appear on the detail view page of the material.
- Now it is even easier to find members in MERLOT. The Affiliation selector you used to identify your affiliations on your profile is in the member advanced search to extend the functionality of finding other members in education.
- RSS feeds can now be obtained for members in addition to what's new in materials in MERLOT. All feeds can be found at http://www.merlot.org/merlot/rss.htm. In addition to the new RSS feeds, any search - material or member - can be turned into an RSS feed by clicking the orange RSS button at the bottom right of the hitlist page.
- Added 'Date Last Modified" to the assignment page so it is obvious the date of an assignment to determine how current the information is.
- Now when you are looking for a material and find a bad link, there is a “Report Broken Link” link on every material detail page. An email will be sent to the MERLOT Webmaster, capturing the item material name and URL.
- Phase I of accessibility changes incorporated into MERLOT. This includes being able to tab to each field in a form, alt tags for all images, redesign of Home Page links, images and buttons so it is obvious what is a link and what where the cursor is on the page. Links have a consistent look and feel; Some images that appeared to be links are now text links. In addition, Added labels to form fields for more descriptive forms when using a screen reader; as much as possible, made lists into HTML lists (using <ul> and <li> tags); made headers into HTML headers (using <h1>, <h2>, etc); added tabindexes to pages with forms for easier keyboard navigation.
To see previous enhancements to MERLOT, visit http://about.merlot.org/MERLOTEnhancements_past.html
We welcome your comments or questions to the Webmaster at webmaster@merlot.org
revised 2/16/08 - bbs
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