Once you have added your website to Pope Tech, you are ready to crawl and scan your site to find accessibility errors. The crawling step is how Pope Tech find the web pages on your site; the scanning step produces the report on accessibility errors and issues found on those pages.
You can also watch the Quick Start: Crawl and Scan video tutorial (2:51).
Scan Turnaround Time
All UMN websites share one scanning queue, and Pope Tech runs up to 4 scans at a time. Scan turnaround time varies significantly based on demand from other UMN users. In particular, scans of large groups of websites cause significant delays for all other users. Scans will typically complete within a few days, but may occasionally take longer. If you cancel and re-initiate your scan, this will move you to the back of the queue.
Pope Tech has made changes over the summer of 2026 to improve the scan queue experience:
- As of July 17, 2026, ad hoc website scans are prioritized over all scheduled scans and ad hoc group scans in the queue.
- As of August 13, 2026, users can view the scan queue position for a website.
- Within the scan widget on the website page, the queue position is noted when a scan is pending.
- Note: the Active Scans widget on the Scan page only reflects the activity of websites to which you have access. This will not reflect the total number of pending and active scans across the UMN Pope Tech queue.
- Within the scan widget on the website page, the queue position is noted when a scan is pending.
For instant accessibility feedback, consider using the WAVE browser extension (Pope Tech is based on WAVE) or, if using Drupal, the Editoria11y module.
Content Behind Authentication
Pope Tech cannot crawl content behind authentication. With additional setup steps, you may be able to use Pope Tech to scan content behind authentication.
Note: Only data classified as public per the University data security classification policy may be scanned with Pope Tech.
- For Drupal sites, see Pope Tech: Scan Drupal Intranet Content
- You can also use the Editoria11y module to uncover content accessibility issues from within the Drupal interface.
- For Google Sites, see Pope Tech: Scan Google Sites Intranet Content
- For other types of websites or web applications, see Pope Tech: Scan websites or applications behind authentication.