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Re: Free scanning tool to crawl websites and test PDFs?

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From: Steve Green
Date: Jun 8, 2022 6:03PM

No, I am pretty sure there isn't a free tool that does that. SortSite does, and the cost is very reasonable so I expect it's as close to free as you will find. However, like all automated tools it can only test a small proportion of the Section 508 success criteria, so you still need to test the rest manually.

It's also worth noting that crawling websites to identify all the pages and/or documents is way more complicated than most people expect. It's not just a matter of entering a URL and clicking the Start button.

We use three different crawling tools (SortSite, Screaming Frog and Xenu's Link Sleuth), all of which are really good, yet they frequently produce different lists of pages or documents for the same website. Sometimes one finds a superset of what the others find, but sometimes we have to aggregate and deduplicate the lists because none of the tools finds every page. A tool that gives the best results on one website, may give the worst results on another.

Just to make things more difficult, many websites appear to be infinitely large, which can happen for many reasons, such as if the crawler gets into a date picker.

Some of this is down to how the website is built, but configuration of the tools is a really important factor.

Even if you find a free tool, it may be a really bad choice if its crawler can't find all the documents you want to test.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd