Announcing the First Beta Release of Ace, by DAISY, the Accessibility Checker for EPUB.

The DAISY Consortium are delighted to announce the first beta release of their new open source software tool – Ace – an accessibility conformance checking tool for EPUB 3 publications. This new tool will provide clarity for the publishing industry where accessibility can mean many things to many people. Based on the requirements specified in the new EPUB Accessibility Conformance and Discovery Specification 1.0, Ace has been designed to check packaged or unpackaged EPUB 3 files at any point in the publishing workflow process.

Specifically, Ace:

• runs automated accessibility tests on EPUB content documents
• extracts the publications metadata, and checks accessibility-related metadata
• separates various document outlines (the Navigation Documents, ToC, the HTML etc) for side-by-side comparison
• presents all the EPUB’s images and graphics and their associated accessibility descriptions in a consolidated table, for easier review
• consolidates the various content features to facilitate human-driven accessibility audits
• can be run as a command line tool, or integrated as a Javascript node module, or driven by an HTTP API

Reports on conformance can be output at all stages of the publishing process as user friendly HTML documents or machine readable JSON-LD data. This type of early feedback is particularly helpful with future conformance issues and for training in-house employees to include accessibility within their workflows. Third party suppliers can be required to implement Ace checking on EPUB files and provide reports for their publishers. The appropriate metadata will be available for content providers to announce their subsequent conformance.

This beta release is actively seeking feedback from technical experts in the publishing industry who are happy engaging with EPUB3 code and working through a command line interface.

Please note, this early release tool is testing the examination and content presentation processes, and through feedback the tool will be refined with a second round of beta testing, with a final mainstream release scheduled towards the end of the year.

Technical experts can get involved with the Ace Getting Started Guide.

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