Ace SMART — User Guide

Overview

Evaluating EPUB publications for accessibility is a two-step process:

1. Automated Inspection

The first step is to ensure the publication passes automated testing, which is accomplished using the following tools:

1. epubcheck — The first step in automated verification is to use the epubcheck validator to check for errors. Although this tool does not specifically perform accessibility checks, it ensures that publications are valid to the EPUB standard.
2. Ace — The next step is to use Ace validator to verify accessibility requirements that can be programmatically determined.

2. Manual Inspection

Although automated validation tools will alert you to problems that can be programmatically determined, there are many aspects of accessibility that a tool cannot verify (quality of descriptions, scripting accessibility, keyboard issues, etc.). The second step in verifying the accessibility of an EPUB publication is therefore to perform these additional manual checks — a claim of conformance cannot be made only from automated testing.

The Ace SMART tool is designed to help you perform manual assessments.

Note that to carry out an evaluation, you will require editing software that allows you to review the resources of the publication is required. This is true even if you are only reporting issues and not fixing them, as you need access to the raw markup of the publication to verify many accessibility requirements.

As an EPUB publication is a ZIP file with a different extension, you can unzip the publication to carry out a manual evaluation rather than use editing programs designed to work on the zipped content. In this case, however, you will have to rezip the files correctly after evaluating the publication. As EPUB has rules on how to order the files in a ZIP container, standard ZIP programs will not recreate valid EPUB files by default.