Services · Compliance & standards
A Section 508 Audit Answers the VPAT Request With Evidence
For the vendor whose government or enterprise buyer has just asked for accessibility documentation, and who'd rather answer with an audit behind the paperwork than with a template filled in from memory.
What We Keep Finding
The email usually arrives mid-deal, and it says please send your VPAT. Section 508 binds federal agencies rather than their suppliers, so nothing in the statute lands on you directly. What lands on you is the purchase order, because a conformance claim becomes a term of the contract you sign, and procurement teams read the paperwork before anybody signs anything.
The other thing to settle before you fill anything in is which standard you are being measured against. Section 508 points at WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA, which is 38 criteria, and it has not moved since 2018, while the Justice Department's rule for state and local government points at WCAG 2.1. Sell to both arms of the same government and you are answering two versions of one standard. So we test against WCAG 2.2, which carries both of the older ones with it, and then report against the rows your buyer's template actually has.
Two definitions inside the template are worth reading before you assume a row is a fail. Supports means at least one method meets the criterion without known defects, or meets it by equivalent facilitation, so an alternative route that genuinely works can earn a Supports. Does Not Support is a majority test, meaning the majority of the functionality misses the criterion, so one defect does not force it. Filling those two in correctly is most of the difference between a document that survives review and one that does not.
What We Check
- Audit against the WCAG requirements Section 508 incorporates, rule by rule
- Test with real assistive technology, since 508 also requires your product to work with it
- Record each criterion as supports, partially supports, does not support, or not applicable
- Write the VPAT from the audit evidence, marking any row a website audit cannot answer
- Confirm which template edition your buyer asked for, because the four editions cover different ground
- Flag the gaps that would fail a procurement review, ranked by risk
What You Get
The three passes every audit here runs. An automated scan, an expert review by hand, and a session with a professional blind screen-reader user on your real pages, with every finding screenshotted, ranked by user impact, and linked to its fix. Your team fixes it and we verify, at half price within 3 months.
The review runs against all 55 WCAG 2.2 Level A and AA rules, and the report then maps onto the 38 that Section 508's own WCAG 2.0 reference covers. Testing the wider set and reporting the narrower one is the safe direction, because W3C states that conforming to 2.2 also conforms to 2.0. Doing it the other way round would not be.
The Honest Limit
One honest limit. A VPAT is self-reported by design and serious buyers know it, so ours is worth something only because there is an audit underneath. It is a conformance report, not a government certification, and the body that publishes the template says in as many words that no VPAT certification exists. The audit is the flat price on this page. The document is quoted per product by email, because its length depends on which template edition your buyer asked for. A 508-edition report has hardware, functional-performance and support-documentation chapters that a website audit produces no evidence for at all.
What It Costs
Rapid Audit: $499, up to 10 pages you pick, report in 5 business days. Standard Audit: $1,499, up to 25 pages in 10 business days. Flat rates, no discovery calls, and a real blind screen-reader user on every engagement. Pick your pages. We bring the humans.
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