BrickHome / About the crawler
About the Brickwork accessibility crawler.
If you found BrickworkAccessibilityBot in your server logs, this page explains exactly what it is, what it requested, and how to stop it. Everything below is a statement of how the crawler is configured, not a policy it is expected to follow.
Run by Brickwork Studio, an independent web design studio in Wolverhampton, United Kingdom. A human answers the address at the bottom of this page.
What it is
It counts public documents and tests them against WCAG 2.1 AA.
Two US federal rules require public entities and recipients of federal funding to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA — the Department of Justice rule under ADA Title II, and the HHS Section 504 rule. Both cover electronic documents, not just web pages, and most organisations have never counted how many documents they publish.
The crawler answers that question from the outside: how many PDFs a site publishes, roughly how many pages that is, and which accessibility failures are present on the pages it visits. The result is a research dataset, and where an organisation looks like it has a problem worth solving, a piece of outreach that starts with its own numbers rather than a generic pitch.
How it behaves
The limits it runs under.
- It obeys robots.txt
Every request is checked against your
robots.txtbefore it is made. ADisallowis honoured, and so is a crawl-delay. - One request every 1.5 seconds, globally
That is across every site being scanned at once, not per site. Concurrency is capped at three. Your server sees a trickle, not a burst.
- At most 60 pages per site
The crawler reads your sitemap and stops. It does not attempt an exhaustive crawl, and it does not follow links off your domain.
- Documents are measured, not downloaded
PDF sizes come from
HEADrequests. The files themselves are not retrieved, not stored and not copied. - Public content only
Nothing behind a login, a paywall or a form. No credentials are used, guessed or stored. No forms are submitted. Nothing is scanned that a member of the public could not open.
- It identifies itself
The User-Agent carries this page's address and a contact address, so nobody has to guess who is asking.
Blocking it
Two lines, and it stops.
No reason needs to be given and nothing needs to be sent to me. Add this to robots.txt at the root of your site:
User-agent: BrickworkAccessibilityBot Disallow: /
The next run reads that and skips the site. If you would rather not wait for the next run, or you want the data already collected about your site deleted, email the address below and it is done the same day — no questions and no reply sequence.
What is not happening
Things worth ruling out explicitly.
- This is not a security scan
No vulnerability probing, no port scanning, no attempts against admin paths, login forms or known exploit URLs. If you are seeing that kind of traffic, it is not this crawler.
- Nothing is republished
The public report that comes out of this work reports medians and distributions. No individual organisation is named in it as an example of failure.
- No personal data is the target
Where a published ADA Coordinator or accessibility contact is recorded, it is the role-based contact your organisation publishes for that purpose. Ask and it is removed.
- No accessibility overlay is ever recommended
Overlay widgets do not remediate documents and do not make non-conforming content conform. The crawler records whether one is installed because that is a finding, not because one is for sale here.
Brickwork Studio is not a law firm and nothing on this page is legal advice. ADA Title II applies to state and local government; the HHS Section 504 rule applies to recipients of federal financial assistance. Neither sets a technical web standard for private businesses under Title III.
Questions, complaints, or a request to be removed.
One person reads this and answers it. Say the word "remove" and your domain goes on the permanent skip list, whether or not anything was ever collected.