VPAT Accessibility: Steps to Create a Successful Website from adacompliancepros's blog

Securing the universality of your EIT products and services

The universality of anything, including that of electronic and information technology (EIT) products and services, is what gives it power. Accessibility to everyone, regardless of disability status, is a critical component of that universality.

That is what the voluntary product accessibility template (VPAT), developed by the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) in collaboration with the General Services Administration (GSA) to provide a means for organizations and businesses to showcase their accessibility compliance and conformity to existing standards, helps to deliver.

Without VPAT accessibility, your EIT product or service will not be considered in mainstream procurement processes, such as those of the federal government and its agencies, educational institutions, and large corporations.

What is VPAT accessibility?

VPAT accessibility is the practice of utilizing a suitable VPAT template to make information, activities, and/or environments sensible, meaningful, and useable for as many people as possible, including people with disabilities.

It begins with selecting the appropriate edition of the VPAT template to use in describing the degree of accessibility of your EIT product or service, followed by VPAT testing of the product or service based on the criteria and technical specifications provided in the VPAT, filling out the VPAT template to generate an ACR, and making the VPAT ACR accessible.

Given that practically all sorts of businesses utilize websites to advertise their products or services, no company or organization can afford to overlook VPAT accessibility, even if its products or services are not in the technology industry. People may question your credibility as a company or group if you do not have a website.

Having a website allows you to make a solid first impression and gives customers confidence that you are a legitimate business. A website also greatly assists you in showcasing your business to potential customers. Nonetheless, having a website that excludes a large section of your potential customers, such as people with disabilities, does not make sensible commercial sense.

The business sense in ensuring website VPAT compliance

Did you know that around 16 million adults in the United States live with a disability? This means that 26% of adults in the United States, or one in every four, have a disability. It is also estimated that a round 87 million (one in every four) adults in Europe have some form of disability, and one billion people worldwide experience disability, accounting for 15% of the world's population.

If your website is inaccessible to people with disabilities, your products or services are excluding a large portion of the market. The disability market is predicted to be larger than China and is emerging as other markets have in the past. It has a yearly disposable income of almost $1.9 trillion!

You don’t want to exclude such a huge market from your products or services, do you? That is why you need to ensure your website is what VPAT accessibility experts simply refer to as "VPAT compliant."

Steps to creating a VPAT compliant website

Clearly, your website can only be considered effective or powerful if it is accessible to everyone. As indicated earlier, the universality of anything is underpinned by the thing’s ability to be accessed by everyone, regardless of his or her disability status.

Here are some essential measures you can take to make your website VPAT compliant and thus successful in accomplishing the goals for which it was designed:

• Choose a content management system that supports accessibility.
• Make good use of headings to ensure that your information is properly structured and arranged.
• Include appropriate alt text and images.
• Give your links unique and meaningful names.
• Use color with caution.
• Check that your forms are user-friendly.
• For tabular data, use tables rather than layouts.
• Ascertain that all of the website's content can be accessed logically using only a keyboard.
• Provide access to dynamic material.
• To assess your website's accessibility, use a trustworthy website compliance checker or a third-party VPAT compliance specialist.

Need help with VPAT accessibility for your website?

Call (626) 486-220 to speak with a VPAT compliance professional for more information and assistance in developing an accessible website, testing your current website for accessibility, or updating your website to make it accessible to all people.