How Universities Assess Accessibility During Procurement

Why Accessibility Review Is Part of Procurement

Under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, public universities are legally required to ensure that the technology they procure is accessible to students, faculty, and staff with disabilities. That obligation extends to third-party software. If you purchase a tool that does not meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards, your institution can face complaints, OCR investigations, and legal action — even if the inaccessibility was the vendor's fault.

Accessibility review during procurement is the mechanism that prevents those situations from arising. It is not a box-checking exercise. It is the process by which institutions confirm, before signing a contract, that a vendor has taken accessibility seriously and that their product will not create barriers for your community.

The Standard Approach: VPAT Review

The most widely used tool for vendor accessibility assessment is the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, or VPAT. Vendors complete a VPAT to document how their product conforms to WCAG 2.1 criteria. Procurement teams then review those VPATs before making purchasing decisions.

In practice, the quality of VPATs varies enormously. Some vendors submit thorough, technically specific documents that give reviewers genuine confidence. Others submit generic templates with vague language that tells you almost nothing about actual conformance. Learning to tell the difference is a skill that most procurement teams have to develop on the job, and the inconsistency that results creates real liability exposure.

What Leading Institutions Do Differently

Universities with mature accessibility procurement programs share a few common practices.

They require VPATs before the demo, not after. Requesting a VPAT early in the process filters out vendors who have not done the work and sets clear expectations from the start. It also gives your accessibility coordinator time to review the document before the sales cycle gets too far along.

They use a scoring rubric. Rather than asking a reviewer to render a pass/fail judgment on a VPAT, leading programs use a structured rubric that evaluates completeness, specificity of remarks, recency, and whether the vendor used the correct VPAT template version. A rubric creates consistency across reviewers and across vendors.

They document their findings. If an accessibility complaint arises after procurement, your institution needs to show that you performed due diligence. Documentation of your VPAT review, including what you evaluated and what the vendor committed to, is what demonstrates that due diligence.

They include accessibility in contract language. The strongest programs require vendors to provide an updated VPAT at each contract renewal and include remediation timelines as a contract condition when gaps are identified at procurement.

The Scaling Problem

Even with the right processes in place, accessibility procurement review is difficult to scale. A large university may evaluate dozens of new software tools each year, plus renewals for existing contracts. If each VPAT review takes two to four hours of an accessibility coordinator's time, the math becomes unsustainable quickly.

This is the problem that Inclusive Digital VPAT Evaluator was built to solve. It automates the scoring of vendor VPATs against WCAG 2.1 criteria, flags incomplete or vague responses, and produces an audit-ready report in seconds. Institutions using it can review more vendors, more consistently, with a fraction of the staff time that manual review requires.

If your institution is handling VPAT review in spreadsheets or relying on a single coordinator to carry the process, this is the tool that changes that.