Accessibility Toolkit for Course Materials

A VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template®) is a reporting format that enables vendors to document their product's conformance with relevant accessibility standards.

Consistent with the original VPAT®, version 2.3 provides a column for recording conformance to each provision of a standard or guideline relevant to a product or service. Manufacturers or venders declare the degree of conformance using one of four conformance levels: supports; partially supports; does not support; or not applicable. Note that, in a previous update of the VPAT, “partially supports” replaced “supports with exceptions.” This change was made at the request of representatives of the U.S. Access Board. Version 2.3 also includes a column for providing a more detailed explanation for each reported conformance level.

• A VPAT is a vendor generated statement (using the required template) that provides relevant information on how a vendor’s product or service claims to conform to the Section 508 Standards.
• The VPAT was designed to provide information on how a product or service conforms to the Section 508 Accessibility Standards (from the U.S. Access Board) for Electronic and Information Technology (EIT) in a consistent fashion and format. In general, Vendors should generate a VPAT whenever they develop products or services that are determined to be EIT.

In each VPAT, the vendor is expected to make specific statements, in simple understandable (recommended) language, about how their product or service meets the requirements of the Section 508 Standards (section by section, and paragraph by paragraph)

There are various types of VPATs. Here are blank copies of each version of VPAT with detailed explanations of each.VPATs:

• VPAT 2.3Rev INT (April 2019) (April 19, 2019)
• VPAT 2.3Rev EU (April 2019) (April 19, 2019)
• VPAT 2.3Rev 508 (April 2019) (April 19, 2019)
• VPAT 2.3Rev WCAG (April 2019) (April 19, 2019)
• VPAT Change Tracking (April 2019) (April 19, 2019)

There are based on:

• VPAT 2.3 508: Revised Section 508 standards – the U.S. Federal accessibility standard
• VPAT 2.3 EU: EN 301 549 – the European Union’s “Accessibility requirements suitable for public procurement of ICT products and services in Europe”
• VPAT 2.3 WCAG: WCAG 2.1 or ISO/IEC 40500 – W3C/WAI’s recently updated Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• VPAT 2.3 INT: Incorporate all three of the above standards

These are VPATs collected from vendors we partner with Centrally.