Glossary · Accessibility term
VPAT
Also called: Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, and the filled-in result is an ACR
A VPAT is the blank form vendors fill in to report how their product measures against accessibility standards, one row per requirement, using one of five verdicts. Supports, Partially Supports, Does Not Support, Not Applicable, and Not Evaluated. That last one is allowed only against Level AAA criteria, so a report using it anywhere else is defective by the template's own rules. The completed document has a different name, an Accessibility Conformance Report, and buyers will say VPAT and mean the report. The current template is version 2.5Rev, from April 2025. There is no such thing as VPAT certification, and nobody accredits one. An ACR is a self-declaration, so what makes it worth anything is the testing behind it and the candor of the remarks.
In practice
The edition decides which WCAG version you are reading, and this is the fact most people get wrong on both sides of a deal. There are four. The Section 508 edition reports against WCAG 2.0. The EU edition reports against 2.1. Only the WCAG edition and the International edition reach 2.2. So a report can be complete, honest and current and still say nothing about the version your contract names, and checking which edition you were handed takes ten seconds.
In the regimes we have checked, what the law requires is conformance to the standard rather than a report about it. That is a statement about those regimes and not about every jurisdiction on earth, so check the one you are selling into. In practice individual solicitations make the report a condition of award, which is why the federal government's own vendor guidance says that without one it may not proceed with a purchase. Both things are true at once, and a supplier who reads only the softer half will lose a bid.
Two compliance details catch nearly everybody. The template opens with about ten pages of instructions and those have to be removed before you publish. And every criterion needs both cells filled, the conformance level and the remarks, so a report with empty remarks is defective by the template's own checklist rather than merely thin.
Reports go stale by design. Every product change can require an updated one, and conformance is expected to hold for the life of a contract, so re-testing each release is the standing expectation rather than a courtesy. Nobody tells a buyer that, and it is the honest reason an ACR is not a one-off purchase.
Why it matters
The body that publishes the template argues that third-party review should not be needed, on the grounds that the product owner knows the product best. Federal purchasing guidance pushes hard the other way, telling buyers to run independent validation testing wherever they can and to verify before they award. Both positions are on the record. The practical answer sits inside the template itself, in the field asking which evaluation methods were used. It invites you to name the assistive technology, the tools and the published test method behind the report. That field is where a real audit shows and where a marked-up guess does not.
How a buyer actually reads it
Federal buyers are told to read Partially Supports plainly, as meaning the product does not conform, and to read Not Evaluated as no assurance whatsoever. So a row marked Partially Supports with an empty remarks cell tells a buyer you failed and would not say how. And a report where every row says Supports invites the question of what was actually tested, which is why the evaluation-methods field decides whether it survives that question.
Where this shows up on the site
Related terms
- ConformanceConformance means satisfying all the requirements of a standard, and WCAG has five of them rather than one.
- Section 508Section 508 is the US law requiring federal departments and agencies, plus the Postal Service, to make their digital products accessible.
- EN 301 549EN 301 549 is the European standard for accessible information and communication technology, written first for public procurement and now the document European accessibility law reaches for when it needs a technical answer.
- Accessibility statementAn accessibility statement is a public page saying how accessible your site actually is.
- Accessibility auditAn accessibility audit is a structured evaluation of a website against WCAG, ending in a documented pass or fail for every applicable rule with the evidence attached.
- ACRAn ACR is a completed VPAT.
Knowing the word is the easy part.
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