Do I actually need a VPAT?

Work down this list

You are selling to a US federal agency

Yes. Section 508 requires agencies to buy accessible information technology, and the accessibility clauses land in the solicitation. Agencies almost always satisfy the requirement by collecting an ACR from the vendor. No report, no purchase.

You are selling to a university, school district or state agency

Usually. These buyers have inherited the same requirement through their own purchasing policies, often after a complaint or a settlement of their own. Many publish a page telling their staff not to buy software without a current ACR — which is how the request reaches vendors who have never sold to the federal government at all.

You are selling to a large enterprise

Increasingly. It arrives inside the security or vendor questionnaire, next to SOC 2 and the data-processing addendum. The team asking often does not know what to do with the answer; they know the box has to be filled.

You sell only to consumers

No, nobody will ask you. That does not mean accessibility is irrelevant to you — private-sector web accessibility litigation in the US is a separate and real exposure — but it is a different problem with a different document, and an ACR is not the tool for it.

What happens if you say no

Nothing dramatic, and that is the trap. You do not get a refusal. The deal simply stops moving: procurement cannot advance a file with an open item, the champion inside the account runs out of ways to push, and a competitor who did produce a report gets compared against nothing.

We have not seen anyone win that argument. The document costs less than a week of the sales cycle it is holding up.

Do you need it done independently?

Not always. Two questions decide it:

• Does anyone here actually know WCAG? Not “we ran a scanner” — automated tools decide roughly a third of the criteria on their own. If the honest answer is no, a self-written report will contain guesses, and a wrong Supports is far more damaging than an honest Does Not Support.
• How much does this buyer weight independence? Federal and higher-education buyers weight it heavily. A mid-market enterprise filling in a questionnaire often does not.

If both answers point at doing it yourself, do it yourself — here is how. We would rather tell you that than sell you something you did not need.

• If the answer is yes, can I write it myself?The full procedure, and the point at which doing it yourself works against you.
• What it costs if we do itPublished prices, what is included, and what the market charges.