BSTA11yBot
BSTA11yBot is the accessibility-audit crawler operated by Booked Solid Technology. It powers our accessibility conformance audits: it loads pages the way a real browser does (headless Chromium), runs deterministic WCAG 2.2 checks against them, and produces the evidence behind the Accessibility Conformance Reports we deliver to clients.
What it does
- Visits pages of sites we have been engaged to audit — or our own properties.
- Renders each page in a real browser and evaluates it against WCAG 2.2 success criteria (axe-core plus our own checks for criteria automated tooling misses).
- Captures accessibility findings only. It does not index content, harvest emails, train models, or republish anything it sees.
How it behaves
- Identifies itself honestly. The token
BSTA11yBot/1.0is appended to a standard browser user-agent on every request, including sitemap and robots.txt fetches. - Honors robots.txt for crawl-discovered URLs, including
Crawl-delay(up to 30 seconds) and per-agent rules — it matches thebsta11ybotagent group, falling back to*. - Rate-limits itself: at least one second between page loads by default, more when your robots.txt asks for it.
- Bounded: audits scan a capped number of pages per run; we don't spider entire sites.
To opt out
Add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: bsta11ybot
Disallow: /We honor it on the next run. If we've been engaged to audit your site under contract, the engagement's statement of work governs scope instead — talk to your engagement contact.
Contact
Questions or concerns about crawl behavior: hello@bookedsolid.tech (or your engagement contact). Include the URL(s) and approximate time; every request our bot makes is audit-logged and we can account for it.
Booked Solid Technology builds healthcare-grade digital accessibility tooling. Our audits are deterministic and reproducible — the same site, scanned twice, yields the same report.