Ace v1.4.5

This is a maintenance release of Ace, the Accessibility Checker for EPUB developed by the DAISY Consortium. Installation instructions and other documentation is available on Ace’s development web site.

The Ace command line "package" is deployed to the official NPM registry under the "latest" release tag (the "next" release tag is used for intermediary test builds): https://www.npmjs.com/package/@daisy/ace/v/latest?activeTab=versions

Here is a copy of the changelog:

• Disabled unnecessarily-permissive Electron BrowserWindow webPreferences sandboxing

Ace v1.4.4

This is a maintenance release of Ace, the Accessibility Checker for EPUB developed by the DAISY Consortium. Installation instructions and other documentation is available on Ace’s development web site.

The Ace command line "package" is deployed to the official NPM registry under the "latest" release tag (the "next" release tag is used for intermediary test builds): https://www.npmjs.com/package/@daisy/ace/v/latest?activeTab=versions

Here is a copy of the changelog:

• Updated XML DOM parser (NPM package)

Ace v1.4.3

This is a maintenance release of Ace, the Accessibility Checker for EPUB developed by the DAISY Consortium. Installation instructions and other documentation is available on Ace’s development web site.

The Ace command line "package" is deployed to the official NPM registry under the "latest" release tag (the "next" release tag is used for intermediary test builds): https://www.npmjs.com/package/@daisy/ace/v/latest?activeTab=versions

Here is a copy of the changelog:

• Fixed language handling: when a translation is missing for a given locale, the English fallback now works as expected
• Updated NPM packages

Ace v1.4.2

This is a maintenance release of Ace, the Accessibility Checker for EPUB developed by the DAISY Consortium. Installation instructions and other documentation is available on Ace’s development web site.

The Ace command line "package" is deployed to the official NPM registry under the "latest" release tag (the "next" release tag is used for intermediary test builds): https://www.npmjs.com/package/@daisy/ace/v/latest?activeTab=versions

Here is a copy of the changelog:

• Updated Electron to the latest 41.x version
• Updated Deque Axe-Core to the latest version 4.11.2 (Daisy fork)

Ace v1.4.1

This is a maintenance release of Ace, the Accessibility Checker for EPUB developed by the DAISY Consortium. Installation instructions and other documentation is available on Ace’s development web site.

The Ace command line "package" is deployed to the official NPM registry under the "latest" release tag (the "next" release tag is used for intermediary test builds): https://www.npmjs.com/package/@daisy/ace/v/latest?activeTab=versions

Here is a copy of the changelog:

• Fix: in some cases (reproduced by some users, but not during development under NodeJS 20-24), runtime error "val" undefined when checking publication metadata with dcterms:conformsTo

Ace v1.4.0

This is a maintenance release of Ace, the Accessibility Checker for EPUB developed by the DAISY Consortium. Installation instructions and other documentation is available on Ace’s development web site.

The Ace command line "package" is deployed to the official NPM registry under the "latest" release tag (the "next" release tag is used for intermediary test builds): https://www.npmjs.com/package/@daisy/ace/v/latest?activeTab=versions

Here is a copy of the changelog:

• Update: the DAISY fork of Deque Axe is now at the most recent version 4.11.1.
• Update: modern revision of the Chromium web browser via Electron (version 41) and Puppeteer (version 24),
• Feature: users can now disable the reporting of images/videos/audios media resources in order to improve performance and save storage space.
• Fix: dcterms:conformsTo values that start with a recognized prefix in the official EPUB accessibility specification but end differently trigger a "moderate" violation.
• Fix: in EPUB3 publications, accessibility metadata expressed using EPUB2 XML syntax is not valid (name + content).
• Fix: accessModeSufficient and accessibilitySummary are recommended (SHOULD, not MUST) but their translated messages were using the "must" term.
• Fix: missing OPF xml:lang in EPUB2 publications is not a violation, only with EPUB3.
• Fix: additional security safeguards for path traversal during resource requests on filesystem, activated Electron context isolation (Node integration was already disabled), blocked default web browser permission requests.

Ace v1.3.7

This is a maintenance release of Ace, the Accessibility Checker for EPUB developed by the DAISY Consortium. Installation instructions and other documentation is available on Ace’s development web site.

The Ace command line "package" is deployed to the official NPM registry under the "latest" release tag (the "next" release tag is used for intermediary test builds): https://www.npmjs.com/package/@daisy/ace/v/latest?activeTab=versions

Here is a copy of the changelog:

• Fixed crash 'confTo.startsWith is not a function' (was related to EPUB2/3 metadata parsing, handling of "conformsTo")

Ace v1.3.3

This is a maintenance release of Ace, the Accessibility Checker for EPUB developed by the DAISY Consortium. Installation instructions and other documentation is available on Ace’s development web site.

The Ace command line "package" is deployed to the official NPM registry under the "latest" release tag (the "next" release tag is used for intermediary test builds): https://www.npmjs.com/package/@daisy/ace/v/latest?activeTab=versions

Here is a copy of the changelog:

• Deque Axe: latest version 4.10.2
• Upgraded both Axe runners (Electron and legacy Puppeteer) to latest versions
• WCAG versions and levels fully enumerated (2.0, 2.1, 2.2 and A-AA-AAA)
• Translations: added Chinese and German locales, updated Japanese and Danish and Portuguese (Brazil)
• DAISY Knowledge Base Japanese redirection
• Website fixes and updates
• Feature: added Docker script to launch Ace Electron in "headless" mode (via virtual buffer)
• Feature: command line flag for process exit code 2 instead of 0 when successful evaluation failure
• Feature: command line flag for evaluation timeout (was only environment variable before)
• Feature: EPUB version now reported
• Feature: sponsorship banner link
• Feature: aria-details reporting on images (alongside alt, figcaption, describedBy)
• Feature(dev): Flox/Nix dependency management for project environment isolation
• Feature(dev): GitHub Actions continuous integration
• Feature(dev): updated the Deque Axe test harness to dump ruleset (DAISY KB mapping) and run single-HTML evaluation
• Feature(dev): tool to analyse dependency tree and prune unused packages that are needlessly included in the project
• Fix: metadata accessibility printPageNumbers/pageBreakMarkers (missing page breaks in publication content documents) VERSUS pageNavigation (missing navigation document page list)
• Fix: EPUB metadata pageBreakSource in addition to dc:source (and optionally the associated refines / source-of / pagination)
• Fix: added support for unknownXXXHazard
• Fix: EPUB pagebreak in addition to title and ARIA-label now allows ARIA-labelledBy and element content text
• Fix: page breaks role does not require epub:type
• Fix: navigation document page list can reference non-pagebreaks
• Fix: removed useless HTML outline
• Fix: added unit tests for image role separator
• Fix: report description was incorrectly checked
• Fix: some URL percent encoding parsing / escaping
• Fix: images with incorrect SVG xlink:href fallback cascade to non-namespaced href attribute (workaround for broken publications)

Ace v1.3.2

This is a maintenance release of Ace, the Accessibility Checker for EPUB developed by the DAISY Consortium. Installation instructions and other documentation is available on Ace’s development web site.

The Ace command line "package" is deployed to the official NPM registry under the "latest" release tag (the "next" release tag is used for intermediary test builds): https://www.npmjs.com/package/@daisy/ace/v/latest?activeTab=versions

Here is a copy of the changelog:

• Fix: aligned with the metadata properties defined in the W3C Community Report, notably missing schema accessibility features pageNavigation, printPageNumbers synonym pageBreakMarkers.
• Feature: added timeout configuration via environment variables, to override the Electron Axe runner processing logic: ACE_TIMEOUT_INITIAL (default 10000, which provides a 10s time allowance for the web window to load its document and contents) and ACE_TIMEOUT_EXTENSION (default 480000 which provides a 480s / 8mn time allowance for the Axe checkers to execute inside the loaded document).

Ace v1.3.0

This is a maintenance release of Ace, the Accessibility Checker for EPUB developed by the DAISY Consortium. Installation instructions and other documentation is available on Ace’s development web site.

The Ace command line "package" is deployed to the official NPM registry under the "latest" release tag (the "next" release tag is used for intermediary test builds): https://www.npmjs.com/package/@daisy/ace/v/latest?activeTab=versions

Here is a copy of the changelog:

• Support for the EPUB Accessibility 1.1 specification "Conformance and Discoverability Requirements for EPUB publications" (W3C Recommendation dated 25 May 2023)
• Fixed ordering rule/check in page list.
• accessibilitySummary metadata is now recommended (SHOULD), not required (MUST). The impact/severity is downgraded from serious to moderate.
• conformsTo metadata is a link in the a11y spec. 1.0 (IDPF WCAG URLs), but can be string label in 1.1
• metadata "refines" is not filtered out for a11y properties that are globally hoisted to the level of the publication (unlike say, media overlays duration for individual spine items, or dc:title subtitle title-type refine)
• Updated Electron Axe "runner" to latest version, includes recent Chromium browser engine revision (matches Ace App GUI 1.3.0).
• Deprecated Puppeteer Axe "runner" in favour of the Electron one, which runs faster and is overall a better option as it delivers an experience consistent with Ace App (GUI). The Chromium version is now the same between Ace and Ace App. This alignment of technologies eliminates incorrectly-reported colour contrast violations (this was a notable discrepancy).
• Upgraded the DAISY fork of Deque Axe to latest version 4.7.2 (this brings many fixes and alignments with the latest ARIA specifications) See daisy/axe-core#11