Main differences between Ace and SMART

EPUB testing discussion for the SDPP-D Grant projects
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Main differences between Ace and SMART

Post by
Daniella.LP
»
Mon Dec 03, 2018 5:23 am
Hi,

I am passing on a great explanation that Farrah provided over the weekend about the main difference between the two tools from DAISY that we are aiming to incorporate into our testing process, Ace (accessibility checking tool) and SMART (Simple Manual Accessibility Reporting Tool).

Ace is a simple automated tool that generates some basic information about the file, for example whether it contains proper metadata, what the heading structure is, whether the images have descriptions and what they are, etc. Simple things that are useful and can be extracted in an automated way.
SMART is a manual tool. No information is generated for you, a human is responsible for analyzing the file and providing detailed answers to the questions.

To use SMART, you upload a file generated by Ace (the .json file), and a set of relevant questions will be generated for you. This is the only automatic part of SMART, the questions that you need to answer are based on the individual file; for example, if the file contains no images, then the questions related to images will not be displayed in SMART.

The questions used in SMART are based on current ebook accessibility standards (WCAG 2.0 and EPUB Accessibility 1.0). The questions that SMART presents require manual answers, after checking the respective element in the file. These are pass or fail questions (whether the file meets a requirement or not), and it is important to provide examples and explain to the publisher how to meet the requirement. At the end, a report is generated based on your pass/fail determinations and notes. To use SMART effectively, it is necessary to have strong grasp of HTML and metadata standards.

Here is SMART's user guide

SMART can be a bit daunting especially for those people new to the world of EPUB/HTML/CSS and the language of the standards. We'll continue learning as we go.

I hope that you find this explanation useful. As I have mentioned, we will still be doing human testing of EPUB files, and recording answers in Excel as before, the shorter list.
Daniella.LP
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