A customer asked for your VPAT. You have no idea what that is.
The official template is free and blank. A consultancy will fill it in for $1,850–$3,100. This is the testing protocol and the four documents they'd produce, written for the engineer who has to do the work — $49.
One-time payment. Instant download. No subscription, no account, no overlay script.
Read this before you buy anything, including this
The European Accessibility Act only binds companies with more than 10 employees or more than €2 million turnover. If you are a four-person SaaS under €2m, the EAA very likely does not apply to you as a service provider.
But an exemption from the regulation is not an exemption from your customer's procurement questionnaire. The buyer asking for your ACR is managing their own risk by pushing it down the supply chain — that is contract law, and no exemption touches it. If that is not your situation, close this tab and keep your $49.
Why this is hard enough to sell
Accessibility conformance sits in an awkward gap. The standard is public and free. The report template is public and free. And yet producing one costs thousands, because the expensive part was never the paperwork — it is knowing whether you actually conform.
Automated tools do not close that gap, and they say so themselves. Run the axe CLI and it prints the disclaimer in its own output: "only 20% to 50% of all accessibility issues can automatically be detected. Manual testing is always required." The criteria that fail most often in real audits — info and relationships, name/role/value, focus visibility, keyboard operation — are exactly the ones a scanner cannot see.
So what you are buying is not a checklist. Checklists are free and they are written for auditors. This is written for the person who has to open the codebase.
The ACR Builder
Walks all 50 WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA success criteria and exports a clean conformance report as HTML or Markdown. Runs entirely in your browser — no account, no upload, no analytics, works offline.
It also refuses to let you file a bad report. Mark a criterion "Does Not Support" with no explanation and it blocks you. Mark something Not Applicable that always applies to a web product and it says so. Fill in all fifty as "Supports" and it warns you that experienced reviewers read that as a sign the testing never happened.
The Conformance Sprint
The part the free tool cannot do for you: determining whether you actually conform, and producing the evidence that stands behind the claim.
A three-day testing protocol
- Day 1 — automated and structural sweep. Runnable axe + Playwright setup for authenticated routes, which tag sets to use and which to avoid, and a console probe for the structural defects scanners miss.
- Day 2 — keyboard and screen reader. The six NVDA and VoiceOver commands you actually need, a scripted six-point walkthrough per page, and a focus-visibility detector you paste into devtools.
- Day 3 — writing it down. How to choose between Supports and Partially Supports honestly, and how to word remarks so they survive procurement review. With before/after examples.
The four artefacts, as fill-in templates
- Evidence log — the one everybody skips, and the only one that matters if a claim is ever challenged.
- Remediation roadmap — prioritised by procurement risk rather than engineering convenience, which is what turns "Partially Supports" from an admission into a plan.
- Accessibility statement — aligned to EAA Annex V, including the disproportionate-burden section and when not to use it.
- Procurement answer bank — the eight questions that come back in nearly every enterprise review, pre-drafted, including the overlay question.
Also included
- Scoping guidance that keeps the audit finite without creating a boundary a reviewer will reject.
- Per-criterion notes on how each one actually breaks in modern web apps — placeholder-only
forms, tooltips that vanish before you can reach them,
aria-labelsilently overriding a visible button label, duplicate IDs from repeated components. - Free updates when EN 301 549 v4.1.1 lands and moves the baseline to WCAG 2.2.
Instant download. If it does not help you produce a report you are willing to send to a customer, reply to the receipt and I will refund it — no questions, no form.
What it costs to do this the other ways
| Route | Cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Consultancy audit + VPAT completion | $1,850–$3,100 | A real audit and a filled report. The right answer if you can afford it. |
| Accessibility platform subscription | $19–99/mo | Tracking and generation. Recurring, and still needs you to do the testing. |
| Free checklists | $0 | The criteria restated for auditors. Accurate, and no help at 2am in your own code. |
| An overlay widget | $490+/yr | No conformance, and an increasingly common procurement disqualifier. |
| This kit | $49 once | The protocol, the templates, and the free builder. You do the testing. |
Where I stand on overlays
Against them, and it is worth being explicit because it is the main thing being sold to people in your position right now.
A script tag cannot make a keyboard trap operable, cannot give a custom combobox a role, and cannot write your conformance report. Overlays do not produce conformance with WCAG or EN 301 549, they have drawn litigation of their own, and buyers' accessibility teams increasingly treat their presence as a negative signal. There is no version of this that does not involve testing your own software. This kit tries to make that as fast as it can honestly be — three days — not to pretend it can be skipped.
Questions
Is this legal advice?
No, and nothing here should be read as it. Whether you are in scope of the EAA, and what a given member state requires of you, is a question for a lawyer. This is a testing and documentation methodology — it helps you produce accurate technical evidence. What you do with that evidence is your call.
Will this make me compliant?
No. Nothing sold by anyone will. Testing tells you where you stand; fixing the defects is what moves you toward conformance, and that work happens in your codebase. What this produces is an honest, defensible account of where you are and what you are doing about it — which, for a procurement review, is usually what was actually being asked for.
Can I just use the free builder and skip the kit?
Yes, genuinely. The builder is MIT-licensed and complete — no crippled features, no upsell wall. If you already know how to test against WCAG 2.1 AA, it is all you need, and I would rather you use it and tell someone than buy something you did not need. The kit exists for the case where you do not yet know how to answer the fifty questions it asks.
What format is it in?
Markdown. Readable in any editor, pasteable into Notion, Confluence or Google Docs, diffable in git so you can track what changed between assessments. No DRM, no portal, no login.
WCAG 2.1 or 2.2?
2.1 Level AA, because that is what EN 301 549 v3.2.1 currently incorporates, and EN 301 549 is what the EAA points at. Version 4.1.1 is expected to move the baseline to WCAG 2.2. Buyers of the kit get that update at no cost.
Who wrote this?
It was researched and written with AI assistance, verified against the W3C specification and the axe-core tooling directly rather than from memory — the criteria set is checked programmatically against the normative count of 30 Level A and 20 Level AA. The free builder was tested against itself: doing that turned up five real defects in it, including a 1.1:1 contrast failure in dark mode, all of which were fixed. It reports zero axe violations. That seemed worth telling you rather than hiding.