About TeresaTechBot
TeresaTechBot is the automated browser TeresaTech LLC uses to retrieve publicly accessible pages of state and local government websites and test them against WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA success criteria. The results are published in the TeresaTech Web Accessibility Directory.
How it identifies itself
Every request carries this User-Agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; TeresaTechBot/0.1; +https://access.teresatech.com/crawler/)The product token used for matching robots.txt rules is TeresaTechBot.
How it behaves
- It reads the site's robots.txt before requesting any page, and again before following any redirect to another page. If robots.txt cannot be retrieved because of a server error, it treats the whole site as off limits.
- It sends at most one request at a time to a site, and waits at least one second after each request completes before sending the next. A longer Crawl-delay in robots.txt is honored.
- It only retrieves pages. It never logs in, submits a form, or sends any request other than an ordinary page retrieval (GET). Requests a page's own scripts try to send that could change data are blocked.
- It does not follow links to sign-in, account, payment, cart, or sign-out pages, and does not download documents such as PDFs.
- It stops after 50 pages per site for this directory (250 for a purchased report) or after 15 minutes, whichever comes first.
- It stays on the site it was asked to test and does not follow links to other websites.
How to limit or block it
To stop TeresaTechBot from retrieving any page on your site, add this to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: TeresaTechBot
Disallow: /To exclude only part of a site, list those paths instead. To slow it down further, add a Crawl-delay line with the number of seconds to wait between requests.
Blocking the crawler stops future testing but does not remove an existing page from the directory. To have a page removed, see removal requests.
Contact
Questions about the crawler: hello@teresatech.com. Removal requests: removal@teresatech.com.