VPAT and ACR Preparation Produces a Report Buyers Can Check

What We Keep Finding

A VPAT is a form you fill in about yourself, not a certificate anybody issues you. The Voluntary Product Accessibility Template is published by the Information Technology Industry Council, and it asks how your product holds up against each accessibility criterion. Filled in, it becomes an Accessibility Conformance Report, which is the document enterprise and US government deals wait on. ITI is blunt about the rest of it. There is no VPAT certification, so nobody grants you one and nobody can revoke it. What you send is a self-declaration, and a serious buyer reads it as one and then goes and checks.

The part almost nobody settles before the deadline is which template. The current version is 2.5Rev, dated April 2025, and it ships in four editions that report against different standards. The 508 edition answers against WCAG 2.0, the EU edition against WCAG 2.1, and only the WCAG and INT editions reach WCAG 2.2. So "send us your VPAT" is really four different requests wearing one name, and filling the wrong one hands your buyer a careful answer to a question they never asked. We agree the edition with you before a single row gets filled.

Then there is the wording inside the form, which means less than it looks like it means. Supports allows for equivalent facilitation, so a product that solves the problem a different way can be marked honestly. Does Not Support is defined as the majority of the functionality failing, which is why almost nobody ever writes it down. That is the room a vendor under deadline uses to run supports straight down the column, and it is why the buyer who actually tests will find you out. Ours is filled from audit findings instead. Where your product partly supports a criterion we write that and describe the gap, because a few honest gray rows are the only thing that makes the green ones believable.