For website owners
About our scanner
If you found AccessibleIndex in your server logs, this page explains who we are, what the scanner does and how to stop it.
Who runs it
Accessible Index is a free website accessibility check and a public index of US government websites, run by Dynamosys Inc., a Virginia company. Its scanner opens public web pages and runs automated accessibility checks: open-source accessibility rules, a keyboard test and a check on a narrow, phone-sized screen.
What it does on your site
- It reads public pages only. It never submits a form, signs in or buys anything. Where your robots.txt allows it, it may open your site’s own search results for one common word, as a visitor would.
- It opens one page at a time, with a pause between pages, and checks up to 20 pages a visit.
- It visits a government website in our index about once every three months, and any other site only when someone asks for a check.
- It fetches a PDF only when someone gives our free PDF check a link to it, and reads it without keeping it.
- It follows your robots.txt file, including any crawl delay.
- It never tries to get around a block. If your site turns it away, we record that and move on.
How to recognize it
Its user agent ends with:
AccessibleIndex/0.1 (+https://accessibleindex.com/scanner)Pages are opened in Cloudflare’s Browser Run service, which signs every request so your server can verify where it came from. Quick reads of a page’s HTML come from Cloudflare’s network with the same user agent.
How to let it in
If your site turns the scanner away, with a firewall or bot rule, or by closing the connection when it visits from Cloudflare’s network, allow requests that carry its user agent, or verify the signature Cloudflare’s Browser Run adds to each one. The scanner tries again on its next visit, so nothing else is needed.
How to stop it
Add these lines to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: AccessibleIndex
Disallow: /The scanner reads your robots.txt before every visit, so this takes effect from its next visit. You can also ask us to stop through our contact form.
What happens to the results
A check someone asks for goes into a report for them. A government website in our index gets a public page with its score, checked again every three months; a website that turns our scanner away has no score, so it never counts as failing. How it works explains exactly how sites are checked and scored.