VPAT vs ACR
Two words for two different things, used interchangeably by almost everyone.
A VPAT is the blank template. An ACR is what you have once you have filled it in. Nearly everyone says "send us your VPAT" when they mean "send us your ACR", and no harm comes of it — but the distinction explains several things that otherwise look confusing.
| VPAT® | ACR | |
|---|---|---|
| Stands for | Voluntary Product Accessibility Template | Accessibility Conformance Report |
| What it is | An empty document structure | That structure, completed for a specific product |
| Who makes it | ITI, who own the trademark | You, or an auditor you hire |
| Says anything about your product? | No | Yes — that is the point |
Why the distinction matters
Three practical consequences:
- "We have a VPAT" says nothing. Everyone can have the template; it is a free download. What a buyer wants to know is what your completed report says.
- The trademark sits on the template. VPAT® is ITI's registered trademark, which is why careful vendors and this site say "ACR" for the finished document.
- It explains the edition confusion. When someone says "VPAT 2.5 INT" they are naming a version of the template, not a level your product reached.
There is no such thing as VPAT certification
People search for it, and some vendors sell something they describe that way, but no body certifies a VPAT. An ACR is a self-disclosure: a statement your company makes about its own product, optionally with an auditor's testing behind it. Nobody issues a pass.
Treat any offer of "VPAT certification", or of a conformance report generated automatically with no human review, as a warning sign. The US Federal Trade Commission has acted against overstated automated accessibility claims, and a document that cannot survive a buyer's reviewer is worse than no document at all.
What buyers actually do with it
A procurement or accessibility team reads the conformance column for the criteria their own obligations depend on, checks the date, and looks at whether the remarks show real testing. They are not expecting a clean sheet — products have defects. They are checking whether you know where yours are. That is the document worth producing.
You can see what that looks like across the vendor reports indexed on this site: browse the index to compare how different vendors word the same criteria.
Producing yours
We scan your product's public pages, collect the evidence, and hand back a draft ACR in the ITI structure: detected failures with the rule and the markup that triggered them, and a specific question for every criterion a machine cannot judge. Your reviewer makes the calls and signs it. $299 per product, or $249/month to have it re-run every quarter and on release.