AccessibilityTrackerBot
If you found this page in your server logs, one of our customers asked us to check their website for accessibility problems, and this crawler is how we do it.
What it does
AccessibilityTrackerBot reads pages on a website and tests them against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It runs only against websites our customers have asked us to scan, and only when they start a scan or schedule one.
- It reads pages. It never submits forms, signs in, or changes anything.
- It waits between requests and scans a limited number of pages per run.
- It reads your sitemap first where one is available, which means far fewer requests.
How to identify it
Requests for your robots.txt and sitemap come from this user agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AccessibilityTrackerBot/1.0; +https://accessibilitytracker.com/bot)Pages themselves are loaded in a real headless Chrome browser, so those requests carry a standard Chrome user agent. That is deliberate: many websites serve different markup to non browsers, and testing markup your visitors never receive would produce a report that does not describe your website.
Because of that, matching on the user agent alone will not cover every request. Allowing our IP addresses is the reliable way to do it. Write to us at the address below and we will send you the current range.
If your security service is blocking us
Firewalls and bot protection often stop the scan before it starts, which leaves our customer unable to check their own website. If that is happening, one of these will usually fix it.
Cloudflare
Add a WAF custom rule with the Skip action, matching our IP range. Security Rules, then Create rule, then choose Skip and select the managed rulesets and bot protection you want bypassed.
LiteSpeed, WordPress hosts such as WPX
LiteSpeed bot verification answers with a challenge page in place of the file that was requested. Ask your host to add our IP range to the allow list for that module, or to disable it for the duration of the scan.
Your own server rules
If you filter by user agent in nginx, Apache or a plugin, allow the string above before any general bot rule, and allow our IP range for page requests.
If you would rather we did not
We only scan websites our customers ask us to. If you believe someone has asked us to scan a website that is not theirs, write to us at the address below and we will stop the scan and look into it.
Blocking us outright works too, and we will not try to get around it. If you do, please be aware that the owner of the website may be expecting the reports.
Contact
Questions about this crawler, requests for our IP range, or anything else: contact@accessibilitytracker.com