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Scan with the Desktop Crawler App for platform

  • Updated

Who can use this feature?

  • Organization administrators, workspace administrators, and workspace users.
  • Available for Accelerate and Enterprise.

To scan with Desktop Crawler App, make sure you've downloaded and installed the application first. 

The Desktop Crawler App can scan up to 100 pages with a crawl depth of 25.

On this page:

Generate an API key

Each time you log in to the Desktop Crawler App, you need an API key.

To generate an API key:

  1. Navigate to organizational level.
  2. Under Manage, select  Tools & Integrations, and then API. 
  3. Select Add API token. 
  4. Add required details, and then select Generate API key. 
  5. Save the API key to a secure file or password manager to be able to access it in the future. If you do not have access to your API key, you must generate a new one each time you use the app.

You will receive notifications prior to your API key expiration. For details about API keys, refer to Create an API token to use Level Access API. 

Add specific URLs to allowlist

DCA will access some resources on the public internet for normal function. If your network security blocks access to these resources, you will need to work with your security team to add them to an allowlist. 

Add the following URLs to the allowlist:  

  • api2.amplitude.com: Used  to track user interaction via Amplitude.  
  • amp.levelaccess.net: DCA pulls best practices from Accessibility Management Platform (AMP) to add details to the results data.
  • Instance of Level Access Platform that DCA is configured to push results to: You must be able to reach your instances of the platform. DCA can't push results to an instance it can’t reach. The initial setup where you choose a workspace and digital assets, won’t happen if DCA can’t reach the configured instance.  

Log in to the Desktop Crawler App

Before you log in and start scanning, download Desktop Crawler App for the platform, obtain your organization URL and API key, and update the allowlist. 

To log in to Desktop Crawler App:

  1. Open the app.
  2. In the Organization URL * field, enter the URL of the organization. For example, https://ACME.hub.essentia11y.com/. If you need to find the organization URL, refer to View organization details.  
  3. In the API Key* field, enter the API key you generated.
  4. Select Log in. 

You are now logged in and ready to start scanning with Desktop Crawler App. To proceed, you must select digital assets you want to scan, and configure the scan settings. 

Note: The workspace contains the digital asset you want to use to store your scan results. If you have access to more than one workspace, the first one will be chosen by default. You can select another one from the dropdown menu. 

Configure and run the scan with Desktop Crawler App

To scan with the Desktop Crawler App:

  1. On the Digital Assets screen, from the Workspace dropdown, select the  workspace with the digital asset you want to scan. A list of assets you can access in this organization is displayed.  
  2. Find the digital asset, for example website,  you want to scan, and then select Create scan.
  3. Configure the settings for the scan. Enter or select the appropriate values:
    1. Scan title.
    2. Website URL.
    3. Scan tag.
    4. Maximum number of pages.
    5. Crawl depth.
    6. Skip URL:
      1. # endings
      2. ? endings
    7. Add webpages to exclude 
  4. Select Authenticate to validate scan setup form entries if you are scanning a protected site, behind a security wall.  Skip this step if you are scanning a public site. 
    When you select the Authenticate button, DCA launches a Chrome browser window and loads the URL specified in DCA as the starting URL. It asks you to log in if the URL is protected. If needed, complete the login.  
  5. Select Run scan.

The application starts crawling and scanning the pages using specified settings. It discovers, scans, and submits results in a sequential manner. Do not close the application. This will interrupt the scanning process, resulting in only partial results being available on the platform.

Scanning will stop when:  

  • All discovered possible URLs are scanned, or 
  • The maximum number of pages is reached.

Once the scan is complete, you can view the results in the platform or run a new scan. 

Understand configuration settings for crawling

Before you can run a scan, you need to specify values for the following settings: 

Setting Value
Scan title

Name of the scan report that will be created. Includes an appended time stamp. 

Example Scan title: Edge Not Scan
Website URL

The page on which the spider will start. Start location. 

Example: www.mycompany.com/foo

Note: The scanner will skip any links that jump to a page that doesn’t start with that URL. That is, in this example,  www.mycompany.com/bar would not be scanned.
Scan tag Scan tags help you to categorize, filter, and find past scans. Refer to  Scan tag best practices.
Maximum number of pages

The number of pages to scan or test. The maximum value is 100 pages.

Example: 50
Crawl depth

The depth of a webpage in the website’s hierarchical structure. Indicates how many sub-levels you'd like to test. Depth aligns with the number of backslashes in a URL. The minimum is 1. The maximum is 25. 

Example of Crawl depth value: 5

Note: If we set Crawl depth to 5 and we scan a page that took four links to reach, we are already five levels deep. After testing that page, the scanner will not look for any more links on that page to honour the limit on Crawl depth. Instead, the crawler moves to other pages in its queue.
Skip URL 

Both Skip options default to off, which is the same as the default for Level Access Platform scans and monitoring. 

  • # ending: Some URLs will have a "fragment identifier” starting with a # to jump directly to certain sections of a page such as www.foo.com#body. These fragment identifiers often indicate different states of the page. The page may present different content depending on the presence of certain fragment identifiers in the URL. Select this checkbox if your site does not use fragment identifiers to trigger different states and content that you want scanned as unique pages
  • ? endings: Some URLs will have one or more “URL query string parameters” starting with a ? and separated by an & to track various inputs needed to control a page state. These might be pagination, a catalog item ID, search terms or anything the site’s developers wanted to store in the URL. For example, you could the URL can look like this: www.foo.com?sort=newest&color=blue. These URL query string parameters have meaning only to the code running this site and may make substantial changes to the displayed content. Select this checkbox if your site does not use URL query string parameters to trigger different states and content that you want scanned as unique pages. 
Add webpages to exclude  Ignores URLs we want to skip when running a scan. Select the checkbox, and add comma separated URLs you want DCA to ignore when running a scan.  For example, if you want to ignore the Logout link/page, add its URL to the list of pages to ignore.  You can also specify these URLs as regular expressions.  

iframes and Desktop Crawler App

Many websites use iframes to embed another page inside a page, for example, to embed a social media widget. Desktop Crawler App always includes findings from iframes in the results. Level Access Platform defaults to excluding them. 

Note the following guidelines:

  • Best practice is to always have iFrame content on. 
  • Issues from iframes are combined with the parent page results. 
  • In the platform, when an issue is flagged inside an iframe, the issue is also given special notation in the locator (||).  That is, element paths from iframes use special notation to show where they came from.  

Troubleshoot Desktop Crawler App

Why did the scan fail?  

Scans can fail if the website is not reachable, it takes too long to respond, or if the computer loses network connectivity. 

My scan did not reach crawl depth I specified?

The Desktop Crawler App can scan up to 100 pages with a crawl depth of 25. You must ensure that Crawl depth aligns with the number of backslashes in a URL. The minimum is 1. The maximum is 25. 

Why do my findings and scores differ between the platform and DCA?

The DCA and platform page selection algorithms might choose different sets of pages to test. For example, if a site has 100 pages but only 10 are scanned, the chosen set of pages might vary between the platform and DCA. Consequently, the findings and scores derived from those findings might differ between the platform and DCA. However, they will be identical if you scan all the pages, because page selection no longer influences the outcome.

 

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