A completed Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, properly called an Accessibility Conformance Report, or ACR, is a supplier’s structured self-assessment of how a product measures up against an accessibility standard (Information Technology Industry Council). Read carefully, it is a genuinely useful procurement input. It is not a certification, and it is not an independent audit. It works best as a starting point for questions rather than a final answer to trust outright.
This is written for the point in an evaluation where you have got a stack of these and need to know how much weight each one carries.
What it tells you
Whether accessibility is part of the product’s engineering culture. A current, detailed report is a good sign. A report from several years back, evaluated against an older standard, suggests the topic has not had recent attention.
Which standard, which version, and when. The current template is VPAT 2.5, in four editions: 508, WCAG, EU, and INT, for a US higher-education purchase, you generally want the INT or 508 edition evaluated against at least WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The standard the Title II rule adopts directly.
Where the supplier already knows the product falls short. This is the most useful part of the whole document, sitting in the “Remarks and Explanations” column. Each criterion gets rated Supports, Partially Supports, Does Not Support, Not Applicable, or Not Evaluated. The “Partially Supports” rows with specific notes attached are the supplier telling you exactly where the work still is. A report with a dozen candid “Partially Supports” entries and clear explanations is more useful than one covered in all-green ratings with empty remarks. The detailed one gives you something concrete to verify and build directly into the contract.
A real basis for contract terms. Once the gaps are known, they become a schedule with actual dates for closing them.
What it does not tell you
Whether each rating is accurate. The supplier filled it out, and nothing in the template requires third-party testing. Quality ranges from a rigorous specialist evaluation all the way down to a quick internal pass. Treat every rating as a hypothesis worth checking, not a verified fact.
Whether the product is comfortable to use, as opposed to merely conformant. A product can pass most individual criteria and still be exhausting with a screen reader if the workflow is convoluted or the focus order fights the layout. The report does not capture what it feels like to complete a task.
Which parts were even evaluated. Reports sometimes cover “the platform” while quietly leaving out the authoring interface, the admin console, the mobile app, or embedded third-party components. The scope statement near the top matters just as much as the ratings underneath it.
What your specific configuration will produce. The report evaluates the product as shipped. Your templates, the content faculty build inside it, and the integrations you add on top all shape what students encounter day to day.
How to use one
Ask every finalist for a current report, evaluated against WCAG 2.1 AA or later, in the 508 or INT edition.
Read the explanations, not just the ratings. Specific, technical notes about a product’s own gaps signal a team that works on this problem. Verify the handful of criteria that matter most for your use. Keyboard operability of the core workflow, screen reader support for the assessment engine, captioning in the media player. Directly on the actual product, with real assistive technology. This does not need to be a full audit. It needs to confirm the report describes the product you are buying.
Ask explicitly what is out of scope, and get the authoring interface, admin tools, and mobile experience covered by name.
Then turn the acknowledged gaps into contract terms: a schedule with dates, a commitment to maintain conformance through future updates, an updated report at each major release, and a remedy for a material failure that never gets fixed.
What this gets you
Read this way, a conformance report shortens the evaluation, the candid gaps tell you exactly what to test and what to negotiate, and it strengthens the agreement, because those same gaps become dated commitments in writing. It turns a document that could easily sit in a folder unread into a working part of the procurement itself.
Shuji Toyama is a learning management system administration specialist at Wrightmann Education Technologists. Part of the Accessibility and Compliance series.
References
- Information Technology Industry Council. Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT), version 2.5. https://www.itic.org/policy/accessibility/vpat
- U.S. General Services Administration. Section 508. Accessibility Conformance Reports. https://www.section508.gov/sell/acr/
- U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. (2024). Fact Sheet: New Rule on the Accessibility of Web Content and Mobile Apps. https://www.ada.gov/resources/2024-03-08-web-rule/
- W3C. (2018). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/