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Thread: Free scanning tool to crawl websites and test PDFs?
Number of posts in this thread: 3 (In chronological order)
From: Kristen Smith
Date: Wed, Jun 08 2022 12:16PM
Subject: Free scanning tool to crawl websites and test PDFs?
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Hi all,
Does anyone know of a free scanning tool that will crawl a website to test =
PDFs for Section 508 conformance?
Thanks!
Kristen Smith-O'Connor
CPACC, Trusted Tester v5
[Description: New Editions Consulting, Inc.]
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From: Steve Green
Date: Wed, Jun 08 2022 6:03PM
Subject: Re: Free scanning tool to crawl websites and test PDFs?
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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
From: Peter Shikli
Date: Thu, Jun 09 2022 4:22PM
Subject: Re: Free scanning tool to crawl websites and test PDFs?
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Kristen,
Steve Green's comment is absolutely correct. Even more so, many of the automated tools report a plethora of warnings, which means you're back to the manual audit and remediation by a trained accessibility analyst to figure out whether the warnings are real and what to do about them.
Cheers,
Peter Shikli
Access2online Inc.
www.access2online.com
Prison inmates helping the internet become accessible