These are the key documents we use to evaluate accessibility during the procurement process.
Summary
- VPAT/ACR: This will be required in most cases.
- Vendor Accessibility Assessment: Vendors may be asked to complete this form if they cannot provide a completed VPAT/ACR.
- Accessibility Roadmap: Vendors may be asked to provide an accessibility roadmap if their product does not substantially conform to WCAG 2.1 AA.
VPAT/ACR
In most cases, we will expect vendors to provide us with a completed Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT). This is a standardized report that documents how well their product conforms to accessibility standards. A completed VPAT may also be referred to as an Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR).
Ideally, vendors should make ACRs publicly available through their website; however, in some cases you may need to contact the vendor and request they share the ACR with you.
If a vendor provides an ACR for the product, please attach it to your TAR request.
Typically, vendors will have one ACR for each product. If they have multiple products, they might have multiple ACRs. In some cases, vendors might have multiple ACRs for a single product. For example, they might have one ACR for their Android app and another for their iOS app, or a learning management system (LMS) might have one ACR covering the student experience and another covering the teacher experience. Please make sure you attach all relevant ACRs to your TAR request.
Vendor Accessibility Assessment
In principle, vendors should be able to provide you with an ACR for their products, but in practice, not all vendors may have one prepared. If so, please ask the vendor to complete our form. This is not as detailed as a VPAT but will provide us with some key information about the accessibility of their product.
If you ask a vendor to complete our Vendor Accessibility Assessment, please let them know that they will need to provide us with a completed VPAT before we can approve a renewal in a future year. A quality report can take several weeks or more to prepare, so it is important that vendors get started on this in advance.
If a vendor lacks an ACR and you ask them to complete this form, you may not have any accessibility documents to attach to the TAR request — and that’s okay. Before you submit the TAR request, please ask the vendor to complete the form; however, you are welcome to submit the TAR request after you have asked the vendor to do so.
In some cases for low risk products with limited usage, an ACR or accessibility assessment form may not be required. If your product has limited usage and an ACR is not available, you are welcome to submit a TAR request without accessibility documentation and we will let you know if the Vendor Accessibility Assessment form is required.
Accessibility Roadmap
If products do not fully conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA, we may request that vendors provide us with an accessibility roadmap. Roadmaps are an opportunity for vendors to share more details about current accessibility barriers and workarounds, provide estimated remediation timelines, and speak to how they factor accessibility into their development process.
Vendors are encouraged to complete our template (please download and share a copy with the vendor), but if vendors have pre-existing roadmaps, those may be accepted as well.
If a roadmap is needed, we will send back the TAR request and ask for one. However, if you are submitting a TAR request for a product with known accessibility barriers, we encourage you to first obtain a roadmap from the vendor and initially attach it to the TAR request.