A polite bot, with a specific job.
Stepfree visits public pages to run authorised automated accessibility checks. This page explains how it behaves and how site owners can control access.
Identification
Easy to recognise
Every request uses a descriptive user agent. A fresh page is opened for each check, and only public same-origin pages are scanned.
User agent
Stepfree/1.0 (+https://stepfree.cloud/bot)Designed to stay out of the way.
- Robots respected
- robots.txt rules, sitemap directives, and crawl delays are honoured.
- Rate limited
- Requests are paced per host instead of sent in a burst.
- Public pages only
- Stepfree does not sign in or scan private account areas.
- Authorised recurring scans
- Domain verification is required before monitoring runs on a schedule.
Block the crawler
Site owners can prevent Stepfree from crawling by adding this rule to their robots.txt file:
User-agent: Stepfree
Disallow: /Private-beta scans use cloud-hosted egress. Site owners can block Stepfree at any time with the robots rule above.