Developer Corner - How Sitemorse assesses a site

02 Mar 2020 | Accessibility | Tech Update

Helen Grimbly
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This week, Support Lead, Helen Grimbly will be outlining how Sitemorse assesses a site.

When Sitemorse scans a site, it uses a breadth-first method. Sitemorse looks at the home page (or start page) and finds all the links on this page. For each page linked from the start page, it looks at those pages and finds all the links on them, and then the links on those pages and so on. The content of each of these pages is assessed for categories such as accessibility, broken links etc. The assessment is automated and will only access publically available pages.

Notes and exceptions to the above include: 

  • Only clickable links that are on the same web server and under the directory of the starting URL, will be followed. For more information on the links that are followed, please see this article: https://sitemorse.com/blog-article/9400/tech-update-what-web-addresses-are-included-assessment/
  • We can assess non public sites if you contact us to arrange the configuration setup (for example username and password) or whitelist our IP addresses. Please see the following article for more information https://sitemorse.com/blog-article/9536/assessing-pages-intranet-or-behind-firewall/
  • Categories assessed for each page will depend on which Sitemorse service you have, for example 'AccessibilityFIRST' or 'ContentQA'.
  • The site will be assessed for up to the number of pages scheduled for the site, or selected for an on-demand assessment.
  • No web cache is ever used, so only pages which exist on the web server at the time of the test will be assessed.

To discuss a site setup please contact Sitemorse at info@sitemorse.com