Don't flag a missing accessibilitySummary as serious error

[mkraetke]

• ACE 1.2.6
• v16.15.1
• Windows 11 with Cygwin

If the accessibilitySummary is missing, ACE reports this as "serious" error. However, the EPUB Accessibility Techniques 1.1 clarify:

EPUB creators should not include an accessibility summary when they have nothing more to add to the conformance claim and other discovery metadata.

The EPUB Accessibility 1.1 state that the summary should but not must be included:

EPUB publications SHOULD include the following [schema-org] accessibility metadata.

We experienced that the report confuses publishers and some accessibility agencies alike. They think they must have the summary in the EPUB even if EPUB includes all other accessibility metadata. So the summary would just repeat the information of the other metadata, which is redundant. So I'd like suggest to lower the error level from serious to minor.

[danielweck]

Indeed, the specification was recently updated to relax the accessibilitySummary rules. Ace must now be updated accordingly.

[danielweck]

Note that EPUB Accessibility 1.1 "Conformance and Discoverability Requirements for EPUB publications" is a W3C Candidate Recommendation (latest draft dated 08 September 2022). In Ace we must be careful not implementing features that are not final, but based on my observation of the working group discussions, I am confident that they have now settled definitely on the accessibilitySummary decision. Is that right @avneeshsingh ?

https://www.w3.org/TR/epub-a11y-11/#change-latest

Substantive changes since Candidate Recommendation 12-Aug-2022: Changed accessibilitySummary from a required to a recommended property and updated its definition to focus less on repeating information available in the other metadata.

[avneeshsingh]

Yes AccessibilitySummary is a SHOULD now instead of MUST

With regards

Avneesh

[danielweck]

Thank you Avneesh. The Ace implementation currently tracks the latest CR Candidate Recommendation of version 1.1 of the specification, so let's fix this as soon as possible in the next release.