Has anybody noticed that when equipping a medium or large shield it appears to calculate the deflection bonus correctly but applies a larger than described accuracy penalty.  Ex. (My Eder clone equips a battleaxe and his accuracy is 54; but when he adds a medium shield his accuracy drops to 38)  Based on the shield description shouldn't it only drop 4 points?

Take under account that when running with a single hand weapon and a free off hand you get an accuracy bonus, when something in your offhand that bonus stops existing and on top of that you get an extra penalty at the accuracy based on the weapon(shield is considered a weapon) you use on your offhand.

Your base accuracy is 42.

 

When you single wield the axe you have 42+12 = 54 accuracy

 

When you equip a medium shield you get 42-4 = 38 accuracy

Thanks for the clarification.  Your explanations make sense, though I don't think the manual or the offical wiki explain this well.  They don't list shields in the weapon categories and since it is unlikely anyone will use a shield by itself you would think they would adust the shield descriptions with a "counts as a second weapon" addendum.  Nevertheless, thanks for clearing that up for me.

If you want the base accuracy, it's better to test it using fists on both slots, and then equip, rather than one handed weapons, due to what was mentioned above.