You’ve been asked for a VPAT.
It usually arrives the same way: a customer’s procurement team will not sign until you send an accessibility conformance report, nobody at your company has heard of one, and a deal is sitting still while you work out what it is. Here is the whole thing — what is being asked, whether you can do it yourself, what it costs, and a real report to look at first.
The short version
A VPAT is a template. Filled in, it is an Accessibility Conformance Report — a document that walks through the fifty success criteria of WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA and states, for each one, whether your product Supports, Partially Supports, Does Not Support, or whether the criterion does not apply — each with a written explanation.
There is no exam and no licence. Either you or a third party may complete it. We charge $800 to $2,000 depending on which standard the buyer named, and we commit to five business days.
- What a VPAT is, in fullThe document, the four conformance levels, and why no certification exists.
- Do I actually need one?Work down the list by who is asking, and what happens if you decline.
- How to write your ownThe full procedure, free. When doing it yourself is right, and when it is not.
What if my product fails?
This is the question people are actually worried about and almost nobody writes about, so here is the honest answer.
Nearly every product fails something. Look at the published reports from the largest software vendors in the world: they are full of Partially Supports. A report that returns fifty unbroken Supports is not an achievement, it is a document that reviewers stop trusting, because it reads like nobody looked.
Procurement is not checking whether you are perfect. It is checking three things:
- Did you actually evaluate the product, or did you fill in a template?
- Do you know what is wrong and can you describe it precisely?
- Is there a plan for the parts that do not conform?
What loses deals is not a failure in the report. It is having no report at all, or sending one whose claims the buyer’s own team disproves in five minutes with a keyboard.
Our own report is the demonstration. We ran this evaluation on our own product first and published it with five Does Not Support findings intact, including one that meant keyboard-only users could not complete a purchase. We fixed them and published the re-test beside it.
How the evaluation runs
- Scope by template, not by page. The home page, the signup, the main application view, settings, checkout, the legal pages. Ten templates usually cover a product; a hundred pages built from ten templates is still ten templates.
- Automated pass. axe-core against every template, for the defects that can be decided mechanically.
- Evidence pass. Heading and landmark structure, page language, image alternatives, link text, form labelling, and reflow at 320 px.
- Keyboard and interaction. A full tab traversal of each template, then probes that activate every control by keyboard and record what happened: what opened, where focus went, whether Escape closed it, whether focus came back.
- Screen reader. A virtual screen reader captures what is announced, in reading order.
- Human verification. Every criterion that comes out as Does Not Support or Partially Supports is checked by hand against the live product before it is written down. A signed report that names a defect the product does not have is worse than no report.
- Signature. Issued and signed by Jun Chen for RENDUN LIMITED, with our address, telephone number and email on the document.
Prices
| Report | Price | When you need it |
|---|---|---|
| WCAG 2.2 AA | $800 | An enterprise or university buyer wants a conformance report and has not named a federal standard. |
| Section 508 | $1,200 | A US federal agency, or any buyer whose purchasing rules inherit Section 508. The most common request. |
| Section 508 + EN 301 549 | $2,000 | You sell into both the US and the EU. One evaluation, mapped to both standards. |
| Audit only, per template | $120–160 | You want the defect list so you can fix it, without the formal report. |
| Re-test after remediation | 50% | Half the original fee, to confirm the fixes hold and that nothing new broke. |
Prices cover a product of up to ten distinct templates, which covers most of them. If yours is larger we say so before we start, not afterwards. What the price includes, and what other suppliers charge.
Start
Send the product URL and, if you have one, the deadline you are working to. If the report is holding up a specific deal, say so — it changes what we look at first. If part of the product is behind a login we will need a test account; that is normally the only thing that slows a report down.
- support@rendun.co
- Telephone
- +1 (585) 514-4668
- See the sample report firstThe evaluation we ran on our own product, with five failures left in.
- What the price includesAnd what the rest of the market charges, so you can sanity-check a quote.