🤖 Overview

T8Abot is a web crawler operated by T8 Internet, a UK-based digital agency (now part of the Bite Group), launched to scan websites for web accessibility compliance in accordance with WCAG 2.x standards. The bot feeds collected page data into the T8 Accessibility Checker, a software tool that generates detailed reports on accessibility violations, helping site owners meet legal and ethical requirements. T8 Internet explicitly states the bot is for legitimate accessibility auditing and not for data harvesting or AI training.

🌐 Technical Behavior

T8Abot issues HTTP GET requests at a configurable crawl delay, typically one request per 1–2 seconds, and respects the Rel=”nofollow” attribute where supported. The crawler operates from IP ranges registered to UKFast (now part of the M247 network), e.g., 81.95.96.0/20, and identifies itself via the User-Agent string T8Abot/1.0. It does not parse JavaScript or CSS dynamically, relying solely on static HTML content to evaluate accessibility features such as alt text, heading structure, and ARIA attributes. The bot also sends a From header containing a contact email (e.g., [email protected]) to facilitate communication with webmasters.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to T8’s official documentation (available at https://www.t8internet.com/accessibility/faq), T8Abot fully honours robots.txt disallow directives, checking the file before each crawl. T8 has stated that they manually verify compliance and have never been reported for violating exclusion rules. The bot will not crawl paths that are explicitly forbidden, including pages with Disallow: /.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The definitive detection string is User-Agent: T8Abot/1.0, sometimes accompanied by a From header set to [email protected]. No additional fingerprinting headers are known. The bot does not mimic browser behaviour and does not accept cookies. Server logs may also show request patterns consisting of sequential GETs to pages with a predictable pace, often targeting the root and common page templates.

📊 Data Usage

All crawled data – including HTML content, image alt attributes, form labels, and colour contrast ratios – is used exclusively to generate accessibility reports for the website owner. T8 Internet does not sell, share, or repurpose the data for search indexing, AI model training, or advertising. Reports are delivered as PDF documents and retained only for the duration of the customer’s subscription.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

T8Abot is rate-limited because its sequential scanning pattern can lead to high request volumes on large sites, potentially degrading server performance. Threshold-based blocking (e.g., limiting to 10 requests per second from the IP range) ensures that legitimate accessibility audits proceed without overwhelming web servers while preventing resource abuse.

ⓘ Data Notice: The information presented above has been compiled from publicly available internet sources. Boteraser aggregates this data solely for informational purposes and does not independently classify, evaluate, or endorse any findings about the bots listed. The accuracy and completeness of this information is the sole responsibility of the original publishers. Boteraser and its operators accept no liability for any decisions made based on this data.