The document procurement teams ask for

What the document is

It is a template, published for suppliers to complete. It walks through the accessibility criteria one at a time and asks how the product measures against each.

The filled in result is usually called an accessibility conformance report. People use the two names loosely, and in practice a buyer asking for a VPAT wants the completed report.

There are versions covering different standards, so a buyer may specify which edition they need before you start.

The template is published and free to download, which is worth knowing before paying somebody for the form itself. What costs money is the assessment behind it, not the document.

Who asks and why

Public sector buyers, universities, school districts, hospital groups and large firms. Many must weigh accessibility when they buy, and the report is how they show they did.

It arrives as one line in a tender pack. Usually late, usually with a deadline. Suppliers who have never seen one tend to lose a week.

If you sell to any of those buyers, it pays to know what it is before somebody asks.

It usually arrives with no warning and a short deadline, attached to a deal somebody has already spent months on. That is the argument for knowing what it is before the email lands.

What the answers look like

Each criterion gets a conformance level and a remark. The levels run from supports, through partially supports, to does not support, with an option for criteria that do not apply.

The remark is the part that carries the weight. It explains what the product does, where the gap is, and what a user would experience.

A report that marks everything as fully supporting with no remarks is treated with suspicion by anyone experienced, because no product of any size is perfect on every criterion.

It is a self assessment

Nobody audits the form before you send it. You fill it in, you sign it, you hand it over.

So it is a written statement about your product, made by you, to a buyer. The caution follows: what you claim there is what you will be held to.

Many suppliers have theirs reviewed by a specializt for that reason, at least the first time.

That cuts both ways. Nobody audits it before you send it, and nobody has to: the buyer will use the product, and a report claiming support for something obviously absent is worse than an honest gap.

What an honest one looks like

Specific remarks rather than repeated boilerplate. Named gaps with a description of the effect on a user. A date, a version, and the name of whoever assessed it.

Partial support marked honestly, with an explanation, reads far better to an experienced buyer than uniform claims of perfection.

None of this is legal advice. The practical point is that an overstated report is a document with your name on it, and buyers do test what it claims.

• Specific remarks rather than the same sentence repeated
• Named gaps, with the effect on a user described
• Partial support marked honestly where that is the truth
• The date, the product version, and who assessed it
• The assistive technologies actually tested with
• A note on what was out of scope, and why

How this relates to a website

The document was designed for products and software rather than for a marketing site, so a small business website rarely needs one.

Where it comes up for a website is when the site is part of what you sell, such as a portal your customers log into, or when a buyer treats your whole public presence as in scope.

If you are asked about your website specifically, the more useful answer is usually an accessibility statement with real known issues and review dates.

Getting ready before you are asked

Know where your product stands. Run a check, read the findings, and keep a list of known gaps with dates, which is most of the work the report requires.

Pages here are written from a conversation about your business and pass a check that runs before anything publishes, so the automated half of that picture stays current.

The rest is the same discipline an accessibility statement needs. Do that continuously and a procurement request becomes an afternoon rather than a crisis.

Most of the preparation is the same work as an accessibility statement — a current list of known gaps with dates, which serves both purposes.