As a research-based pharmaceutical company dedicated to putting patients first, one of Merck's core values is access. Helping to provide access to health information on Merck.com is an important part of who we are and what we do. 

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB), the largest consumer organization of blind people in the United States, has awarded its 2007 Non-Visual Accessibility (NVA) certification to Merck & Co., Inc. for its corporate Web site www.merck.com. Merck was the first U.S. pharmaceutical company to earn NFB-NVA certification in 2005, acknowledging praise for accessibility to a Web site for people who are blind as well as sighted.
 
A well-known and respected company in the Web content accessibility industry, and an authorized Web accessibility consultant of the NFB, performed a comprehensive evaluation of the Merck corporate Web site. Following the evaluation, this company facilitated the accessibility modifications and performed a functional test of the Web site using various assistive technologies such as screen reading and screen magnification software. This company also identified several other usability factors that went above and beyond the scope of current accessibility standards. 

Since 2005, Merck has been working to improve the accessibility of the Merck & Co., Inc. corporate Web site with a goal of achieving compliance with the Priority-1 and Priority-2 checkpoints of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). 

The Merck corporate Web site offers the following features to enhance the experience of users with disabilities:    

• Associated text for all images and other non-text elements.
• Navigational aids on all pages with skip navigation links. These links facilitate keyboard navigation to bypass groups of links on a page and enable a direct to main content
• A tool that permits a user to re-scale text size on individual Web pages 
• Title attribute to make linked text more meaningful or to indicate if the link opens a new browser window
• Structural markup to indicate headings and lists to aid in page comprehension
• Association of forms with labels and instructions for screen reader users
• Table navigation instructions and association of all data cells with their headers

Note:

1. The Merck & Co., Inc. corporate Web site requires JavaScript and style sheets.  Script alternatives are provided where necessary and the scripts used produce accessible content.

2. The style sheets are necessary to preserve the aesthetics of the visual design of the Web site.

3. Some links are longer than the recommended 60-character length.

Merck will direct future accessibility efforts to cover sections of the Web site that are excluded at present. These exclusions on the Merck Web site include accessibility of multimedia and PDF documents.

In addition, this Accessibility Statement does not cover the following sections of the Merck Web site:

• Newsroom publications prior to 01/01/2005
• Investor Information other than http://www.merck.com/finance/stockholder/index.html
• The Merck Manuals
• World Wide other than  http://www.msd.com/

Sections of the Web site developed and maintained by third parties do not currently conform to these accessibility standards. These include:

• "Search for Jobs" and "Post your Resume" functionality of the Careers section
• Investor Relations page at http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=73184&p=IROL-irhome

Dated: February 20, 2007