VPAT

What is a VPAT?

A VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) is a standardized document that describes, criterion by criterion, how far a technology product or service meets the applicable accessibility standards.

It’s published and maintained by the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), a technology industry association, and it’s free to use. The current version is 2.5Rev, from April 2025.

Its purpose is practical: to let software buyers compare vendors using the same format, instead of having to interpret marketing claims along the lines of “our platform is fully accessible”. Instead of a sentence, a VPAT forces a vendor to take a position on every criterion in the standard.

VPAT and ACR: not the same thing

The two terms get used interchangeably all the time, but they refer to different things:

• The VPAT is the blank template, the structure ITI publishes.
• The ACR (Accessibility Conformance Report) is that template filled in with the results of evaluating a specific product.

The distinction isn’t pedantry. When you ask a vendor for “the VPAT”, what you need to receive is a complete ACR: with a date, the exact version of the product evaluated, the testing methodology, the name of whoever carried it out, and remarks on each criterion. A document with only the conformance-level column filled in, with no explanation at all, meets the form but is useless for making a decision.

The four VPAT editions and which one to ask for

This is where most purchases go wrong. The VPAT isn’t a single document: it comes in four editions, each referring to a different standard.

Which one you need depends on where the product will be used, not on which one the vendor sends you. For U.S. federal procurement and anything tied to Section 508, the 508 edition is the right one. If you buy or sell in Europe, what you need is the EU or the INT edition, because those are the ones that map against EN 301 549, the technical reference standard in European public procurement and the one underpinning the European Accessibility Act, in force since June 28, 2025. If your organization operates on both sides of the Atlantic, ask for INT and settle it in one document.

Accepting the wrong edition and treating it as sufficient is a silent mistake: the document looks correct, it’s well made, and it simply answers a different question.

How to read a VPAT: the four conformance levels

Every criterion in the standard is assessed with one of four labels. Understanding what each one means is, basically, knowing how to read the document:

One revealing detail: the “Partially Supports” label replaced the earlier “Supports with Exceptions” at the request of the U.S. Access Board, precisely because the old wording made it possible to present non-compliance as qualified compliance. The rename was a deliberate decision to make the document harder to dress up.

Hence the most useful rule of thumb when reading an ACR: the value isn’t in the level column, it’s in the remarks column. An honest report with plenty of well-explained “Partially Supports” entries is infinitely more useful than one with everything marked “Supports” and the comments column empty.

What a VPAT doesn’t guarantee

This is the part worth being clear about before you base a purchasing decision on one of these documents.

• It isn’t a certification. It’s self-declared: the manufacturer fills it in. There’s no body that validates it and no mandatory external audit. An ACR may have been produced by an independent lab or by the vendor’s marketing team, and the format is identical in both cases.
• In practice, it expires. It evaluates a specific version of the product on a specific date. A report from three years ago, about a version that no longer exists, says nothing about the software you’re about to buy.
• The scope may be partial. It’s common for the report to cover the content player but not the admin panel, or the web app but not the mobile one. If the scope isn’t written precisely, assume it’s narrow.
• It doesn’t cover your content. A tool being accessible doesn’t make the courses you produce with it accessible. That part depends on how you design, and it’s the instructional design team’s job.
• It doesn’t measure the real experience. Meeting every criterion in a standard and being awkward to use with a screen reader are perfectly compatible.

None of this makes it a useless document. It makes it a starting point for asking better questions, not a closed answer.

How to request and verify a VPAT when buying training software

If you’re evaluating an LMS or an authoring tool, these are the questions worth including in the RFP and what to look at in whatever comes back:

• Ask for the edition that matches your market, explicitly, and don’t accept a different one as your only evidence.
• Require the date and the product version. If the ACR is more than twelve months old or evaluates an earlier version, ask for an updated one.
• Ask who carried out the evaluation. Internal, external or mixed. All three are legitimate; not knowing isn’t.
• Check the scope. It should cover administration, content creation and consumption, on desktop and on mobile.
• Read the remarks on the “Partially Supports” entries related to keyboard, screen readers, contrast and captions. Those are the ones that affect a course most.
• Ask for a demo with the real product, navigating with the keyboard only and with a screen reader. Fifteen minutes of testing says more than thirty pages of report.
• Ask about the remediation plan for what doesn’t comply, with timelines. A serious vendor has it in writing.

The same applies to an LMS migration: the accessibility of the destination platform is a selection criterion, not something you review after signing.

What a VPAT means for an L&D team

For anyone managing training, the VPAT shows up at three very specific moments:

• When buying. It’s the documentary evidence that lets you compare vendors on the same terms and leave a record of due diligence in the file.
• When responding. If your organization sells training or content to third parties, sooner or later someone will ask you for an ACR. Having one ready shortens sales cycles, especially in the public sector.
• When auditing what you already have. Reviewing the ACRs of the tools already in use usually surfaces known gaps nobody had read.

In all three cases the document is the beginning of the work, not the end. The WCAG —and WCAG 2.2 in particular— are still the standard you actually have to meet; the VPAT is just the way to declare it, and e-learning standards solve a different layer of the problem. It’s worth not confusing the three planes, just as accessibility isn’t confused with regulatory compliance in safety matters.

Conclusion

The VPAT is a free ITI template that, once filled in, becomes an ACR: a report that declares criterion by criterion what a technology product does and doesn’t meet in terms of accessibility. It has four editions, and the one that matters is the one tied to the market where the product will be used — 508 in the United States, EU or INT if Europe is in play. Its great virtue is that it forces vendors to take a detailed position. Its great limit is that the manufacturer writes it, so it’s worth exactly as much as the honesty and rigor of whoever signs it.

That’s why the useful question isn’t whether a vendor has a VPAT, but what it says and who wrote it. If what you’re after is creating genuinely accessible e-learning content and learning objects, accessibility has to live in the tool you produce them with, not only in the document that describes it. isEazy Author is built so courses are born accessible without turning it into a separate project, and you can check that for yourself: request a demo and try it navigating with the keyboard alone.