What is a VPAT, and why is procurement asking for one?

A VPAT — Voluntary Product Accessibility Template — is the standardized document government and enterprise buyers use to evaluate whether your product is accessible. No VPAT usually means no bid.

What a VPAT contains

The VPAT (its filled-out form is formally an Accessibility Conformance Report) lists every WCAG / Section 508 criterion with a conformance level — Supports, Partially Supports, Does Not Support — plus remarks explaining each rating. Buyers' accessibility reviewers read the remarks first: vague ones are a red flag.

When you need one

Any federal sale, most state/university/healthcare procurement, and a growing share of Fortune-500 vendor onboarding. It's requested at RFP time — which means the worst moment to discover you need one is the week a proposal is due.

How to get one

Three routes: write it yourself (credible only with real accessibility expertise — a wrong rating in a signed document is worse than no document), pay a specialist firm ($1,500–5,000 typical), or start from an automated pre-fill and have an auditor confirm the manual criteria. VPATForge's scan generates that pre-fill in seconds; our fixed-price VPAT service handles the confirmation and signature.

How long it takes

A scan-based skeleton: seconds. A confirmed, signable VPAT for a typical SaaS product: days, not months — if the underlying site is in reasonable shape. See how to get a VPAT for the step-by-step.