A VPAT is a vendor's claim, not an independent audit

The workload

Selling software to a government or enterprise buyer that requires accessibility documentation means filling out a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, and the work is naming, honestly, how the product performs against each individual accessibility criterion rather than asserting overall compliance. The Information Technology Industry Council's own VPAT page, retrieved 16 September 2026, states the template translates accessibility requirements and standards into a document a vendor completes itself, currently at Version 2.5Rev, released April 2025, with four editions covering Section 508, the EU standard, WCAG, and an international combination.

What the documents show

Verified, from ITI's own page: for each criterion the vendor must declare one of four conformance levels, 'supports; partially supports; does not support; or not applicable,' a per-criterion report, not a single pass/fail claim. Verified, from the same page: 'ITI does not review or approve VPATs,' meaning the completed document, once published as an Accessibility Conformance Report, is the vendor's own self-reported claim unless the buyer separately commissions independent testing. Verified, from the US government's own guidance on the Accessibility Conformance Report: federal contracting officials use the completed ACR to assess ICT for accessibility when doing market research and evaluating proposals, meaning the document functions as a procurement input the buyer weighs, not a certification the government or ITI issues. Neither document states that a buyer must commission independent verification; a solicitation may require it, and where one does, that requirement comes from the buyer's own procurement terms, not from the VPAT format itself.

The operating cost

The template itself is free and carries no filing fee; the operating cost is the labor of testing the product against each criterion honestly enough to fill in the four-level answer, plus the schedule cost of a sales cycle that may stall until the document exists. Where a buyer requires independent testing rather than a self-published VPAT, the added cost is whatever an accessibility auditor charges for that work, a figure neither ITI's page nor Section508.gov's page states, and this entry does not estimate one.

The stop condition

Editorial: a VPAT is current only as of the version of the product it describes; the practical stop condition is a product update that changes any reported criterion, at which point the self-reported document is out of date until it is revised, since neither publisher's page describes an expiration date attached to the template itself.

• Does the completed VPAT report each criterion at one of the four defined levels, or does it claim blanket compliance the template does not ask for?
• Has a specific buyer's solicitation asked for independent verification, or does a self-published VPAT satisfy its stated requirement?
• Is there a process to reissue the VPAT when the product's accessibility posture changes, rather than leaving an outdated one on file?

The document a founder fills out and the document a skeptical buyer wants read are not automatically the same thing; ITI's own page is explicit about which one the VPAT format actually is.