VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template)
A VPAT is a standardized template, published by ITI, that vendors use to document how their product conforms to accessibility standards.
A VPAT, or Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, is a standardized document that a vendor completes to describe how accessible its product or service is. It is published and maintained by the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), a trade association, and it has become the default format that buyers, especially government buyers, expect when evaluating the accessibility of technology they are considering purchasing.
The template comes in several editions so it can map to whichever standard a buyer cares about. Current editions include a 508 edition aligned to the Revised Section 508 Standards, a WCAG edition covering the W3C guidelines, an EU edition based on EN 301 549, and an INT (international) edition that combines all three. A vendor chooses the edition that matches the market it is selling into.
Structurally, a VPAT walks through each applicable success criterion and asks the vendor to declare a conformance level, typically Supports, Partially Supports, Does Not Support, or Not Applicable, accompanied by remarks that explain the rating and describe any known gaps. The quality of those remarks is what separates a credible report from a box-checking exercise; experienced buyers scrutinize the explanations, not just the labels.
A crucial and frequently misunderstood point is that a VPAT is a self-disclosure, not a certification. Completing one does not make a product certified as accessible, and no one issues a Section 508 compliant seal. The template is only as trustworthy as the testing behind it, which is why a credible VPAT is grounded in real automated and manual testing and is kept current with the product version being evaluated.
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Open the VPAT starter generatorRelated terms
ACR (Accessibility Conformance Report)
An Accessibility Conformance Report is the completed, filled-in VPAT that documents a product's actual conformance findings.
VPAT vs ACR
The VPAT is the blank template; the ACR is the completed report you produce by filling it in, so every ACR starts life as a VPAT.
Section 508
Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act requires U.S. federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible, using WCAG 2.0 Level AA as the technical standard.
EN 301 549
EN 301 549 is the European standard for ICT accessibility, used across EU public procurement and referenced by the European Accessibility Act.
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