VPAT 2.5 · ACR
The accessibility document procurement keeps asking you for.
$499 buys a pre-filled Accessibility Conformance Report for one site. We fill in every success criterion our scanning can actually evidence, and attach the evidence. You, or an expert you hire, complete the rest and put your name to it. We are not selling you a finished conformance claim, because nobody can honestly sell you one of those.
VPAT / ACR preparation · $499, once
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- 1 site, 1 Accessibility Conformance Report
- WCAG 2.2 levels A and AA, every criterion listed
- Our evidence attached to the rows it can speak to
- An editor for the rows only a person can decide
- Payment handled by Stripe. We never see your card.
- No recurring charge and nothing to cancel
| Section | Detail |
|---|---|
| Product | Name, version, description, contact |
| Evaluation | Who assessed it, when, and how |
| Standards | WCAG 2.2 level A and level AA |
| Terms | The four conformance levels, defined |
| Table 1 | Every level A criterion, with remarks |
| Table 2 | Every level AA criterion, with remarks |
| Method | Which rows a machine informed, which a person judged |
The short version
What a VPAT actually is
A VPAT is a template. The Information Technology Industry Council publishes it, the current version is 2.5, and filling one in produces a document called an Accessibility Conformance Report, or ACR. People use the two words interchangeably, and strictly the VPAT is the blank form and the ACR is your completed one.
Its whole job is to answer one question for every success criterion in a standard: does this product support it, partially support it, not support it, or is the criterion not applicable here. Then, next to each answer, it asks you to explain yourself in plain language. That explanation column is the part buyers actually read.
There is no issuing body, no examination and no certificate. An ACR is a statement made by the supplier about their own product. Its value comes entirely from being specific, dated, honest and signed by somebody who is accountable for it.
Who asks for one
You are usually not writing this for yourself.
Enterprise procurement teams ask for an ACR before they will put software through legal review. Universities and school districts ask for one at the same stage. In the United States, federal agencies buying technology have to meet Section 508, and the practical way that gets checked is by asking the vendor for a current ACR, which is why one turns up as a line item in so many public sector tenders. Buyers in Europe ask for the equivalent against EN 301 549.
So the pressure to have one almost never comes from your own team. It comes from a deal that has stopped moving, and from a form somebody has sent you with a deadline attached.
Be clear on this before paying
What we do, and what we cannot do.
Automated testing can evidence a minority of WCAG success criteria and can say nothing useful about most of the rest. That is not a limitation of our scanner in particular. It is true of every scanner, because most criteria turn on meaning, purpose and context, and those need a person.
So we do the part a machine can do properly, and we say plainly what we could not determine rather than guessing at it. Every row states which of those it is, and the editor will not let you export the document until a person has decided every one of them.
Split of the work
We provide
- Every WCAG 2.2 A and AA criterion, listed in the VPAT 2.5 structure
- A pre-filled answer wherever our scan found a real failure, with the rule, the page and the count behind it
- A clear "no failure detected" where that is all we honestly found
- A clear "no machine can decide this" everywhere else
- An editor, and a document that prints properly
You provide
- The determination on every criterion, including the ones we evidenced
- The remarks column, in your own words
- The product name, version and description
- The name of whoever evaluated it, and the date
- The decision to send it to a buyer
The price
Why this is $499 and a consultant is $2,000 to $10,000.
Accessibility consultancies commonly charge somewhere between $2,000 and $10,000 to produce an ACR, and at the top of that range they are usually not overcharging. The work is real: manual testing with a screen reader, keyboard testing every flow, checking focus order and error handling by hand, then writing and standing behind the judgement calls.
We are cheaper for exactly one reason. You do the judgement parts, not us. We have not found a shortcut, we have not automated the human testing, and we have not discovered that the expensive part was unnecessary. We removed the expensive part from what you are buying and handed it back to you, along with the tooling to do it.
That trade is a good one when you have somebody in house who knows the product and can test it, and when the document is holding up a deal that is worth more than the delay. It is a bad one when nobody on your side can do the manual testing, because then the honest answers to those rows do not exist, and no amount of software will invent them. In that case hire the consultancy. We would rather say so now than take $499 from you for a document you cannot finish.
One more honest note. An expert you hire can use this too. Buying the prepared report and handing the editor to a contractor usually costs less than paying them to build the whole thing from a blank template, because the mechanical work is already done and evidenced.
The sequence
What happens after you pay
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Verify and scan the site
The same domain verification and crawl the rest of the product uses. The scan is what the pre-filled answers and every piece of evidence come from.
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We prepare the report
Every WCAG 2.2 A and AA success criterion, in order, each one carrying what our testing determined and the basis for it. Rows a machine cannot decide are marked as needing you.
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You complete it
For each criterion you set the conformance level and write the remarks. Our evidence sits beside the row you are deciding, so you are reading data rather than guessing. Progress is counted for you, and the export stays shut until every row is decided.
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You export and send it
A PDF in the VPAT 2.5 structure, naming you as the evaluator, dated, and stating in its own words how much of it automated testing informed. Come back and revise it whenever the product changes.
Questions
Things worth knowing first
Are you certifying my product as accessible?
No. We are not a certification body, no such body exists for this, and an ACR is not a certificate. It is a statement you make about your own product. Your name goes on it, ours does not, and the document says so on its face.
Can I just export it with the automated answers and send that?
No, and that is deliberate. There is no bulk accept, no skip and no override. Every row has to be decided by a person before the document can be produced. A report that quietly presents unreviewed rows as answers is a false statement to whoever you send it to, and it is the single most damaging thing you could do with this product.
Where our scan detected a failure and you record Supports anyway, we also ask you to say why in writing. The finding may well be a false positive or already fixed. A buyer who later spots the disagreement deserves an answer that was written at the time.
How many rows will I actually have to fill in myself?
All of them, and you should know that before you pay. Every level A and AA success criterion gets a decision from you. Automated testing can even partially speak to only about two fifths of them, and for almost all of those a clean result means "no failure was detected", which is not the same as passing. That is why the honest version of this product is a tool and not a document delivery service.
What you are buying is that every row arrives with the criterion, the automated finding, the rule ids, the affected pages and the counts already in front of you, in the right structure, with the arithmetic and the formatting done. You are deciding, not researching.
Is this the same as your one-off audit?
No. The one-off audit is a dated record of what automated testing found, and we write all of it. This is a conformance report in the format procurement asks for, covering every criterion including the ones we cannot test, and you write the parts that need judgement. Buyers asking for a VPAT will not accept an audit PDF instead.
Does it cover Section 508 or EN 301 549?
We produce the WCAG edition, covering WCAG 2.2 levels A and AA. Those criteria are the substance of the Section 508 and EN 301 549 chapters too, so a WCAG edition ACR is commonly what buyers accept, but if a tender specifically demands the INT edition with the full 508 and EN chapters, this is not that document. Check the request before buying.
What if my product changes?
An ACR is a statement about a version on a date, so it goes stale. You can revise yours and export again as often as you like at no extra cost. Buying another credit is only needed for another site.
Before you buy
Automated testing detects roughly 30-40% of WCAG success criteria. It cannot determine whether a site is legally compliant, and it is not a substitute for manual review and assistive-technology testing. This report is a record of what automated checks found on the date shown - nothing more, and nothing less.
This is a one-time charge of $499 in US dollars. It is not a subscription, so there is nothing to cancel and nothing renews. What you receive is a prepared report and the tooling to finish it. The finished document is your statement about your product, not ours about it, and it is not a certificate, a legal opinion or protection from anything.