Run scans and set a schedule

Start a scan yourself

Select Scan now on a site card. You can also open the site and start a scan from there. The scan runs through a queue so that everyone's scans get a fair share of capacity. While you wait, the card shows "Queued" and, when other scans are ahead of you, your position.

When the scan finishes, the card shows the number of findings, the number of pages scanned and what changed since the previous scan, for example "+1 new, 3 fixed". We also email the PDF report to your account address.

Put a site on a schedule

Open the site and choose the Settings tab. Under "Scan schedule", pick how often to rescan. You get an email each time a scheduled scan finishes, with what changed since the last scan. If a scheduled scan fails, you get a notice.

• Free: manual scans, or one scheduled scan a month.
• Monitor and Pro: manual, weekly or monthly.

A monthly schedule follows your most recent scan, so running a manual scan resets the clock. Dates and times display in your own time zone.

Limits per plan

• The monthly scan count resets at the start of each calendar month. Unused scans do not roll over.
• If you start a scan after reaching a limit, it is refused with a message that names the limit and the plan that raises it. Nothing is charged.
• If a scheduled scan would go over your monthly allowance, it is skipped and we email you.
• A scan stops at your plan's page limit. If your site has more pages than that, the scan covers only the pages up to the limit. A scan that reached the limit cannot be used to publish a statement or generate a VPAT, because it does not cover the whole site. If most of your pages share the same layouts, a template scan can cover every layout within the same limit.
• Scan history is kept for 30 days on Free, 6 months on Monitor and 12 months on Pro. Older scans and their PDF reports are deleted.

Need more than 250 pages or more sites? Ask about a custom plan.

Scan a large site by template

If your site has thousands of pages that share a few layouts, a normal scan only reads the first pages it finds. A template scan tests a few varied pages from every layout instead. See Scan a large site by template for how it works and when to use it.

What the scanner does on your site

The scanner loads your public pages the way a visitor's browser would. It starts at the address you gave, follows links, and uses your sitemap when it finds one. It reads your robots.txt first and obeys it. It does not log in or submit forms, starts no more than one new page per second and loads at most two pages at a time.

Requests identify themselves as AccessibilityConformanceBot. If you want to block the scanner from part of your site, or you need to allow it through a firewall, see About our crawler.

Rename a site

Open the site, choose the Settings tab and use Site name at the top. Type the new name and select Save name. The owner and Editors can rename a site. Viewers can see the name but not change it.

• The name appears on your dashboard, in reports and in the statement preview.
• The website address cannot be changed, because scan history, ownership confirmation and statements are tied to it. If the address is wrong, add the site again with the right one.
• A published statement keeps its own organization name. Change that in the statement panel and publish again.
• An account can only monitor a website once. Adding the same address again, even under a different name or as the www or http version, is refused and points you to the existing site.

Pause or remove a site

• Pause stops scheduled scans for a site and keeps its history. Select Activate to turn them back on.
• Remove deletes the site and its scan history from your account. Only the account owner can remove a site.