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Re: Automated WCAG testing tool that is also a good crawler

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From: Steve Green
Date: Oct 31, 2017 11:57AM

We also use SortSite. It piggybacks onto Internet Explorer, so it can extract some types of JavaScript links from the DOM. However, it is extremely slow because it only uses 2 or 4 concurrent threads (I'm not sure which, but it is determined by Internet Explorer). We often find that it can only scan a small part of a website in the time we are given to test it.

It also only lists a subset of the pages - my recollection is that it regards different URLs as being the same if the only difference is the arguments in the URLs, which is usually an invalid assumption. Furthermore, it does not recognise all types of JavaScript links, particularly AJAX calls. Depending on how your URLs are constructed and what you use AJAX for, this could be anywhere from a showstopper to irrelevant.

In our experience, Screaming Frog is the best crawler by a long way. It is much faster than SortSite and finds pages that no other crawlers can find (the key is to select the latest JavaScript setting but there are a lot of other settings that need to be changed from their default). It can be throttled if necessary.

Unfortunately, Screaming Frog does not test for accessibility so we export the list of URLs and create a single HTML page that links to them all. We then run SortSite against that page. It's a bit of a kludge but it's sometimes the only way to run an automated test against every page on a website.

Regards,
Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd