Any vendor working with the government or any organization that receives government funding will need to get well-versed with Section 508 VPATs. What does VPAT stand for, you may ask? VPAT stands for Voluntary Accessibility Template. It is a form that documents your accessibility and you cannot secure a contract or pursue an RFP if your digital properties don’t have one.
Every business should aim to get their websites and digital properties accessible, but 508 compliance is a necessity for many. In May of 1999, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), became the authoritative source on how to comply by developing the first set of digital accessibility guidelines. There are multiple degrees of compliance criteria and not every business must reach the highest standard. Determining which level you need to achieve depends on various factors – let one of our accessibility experts help you determine what compliance criteria you should work toward.
In order to determine if your digital properties are Section 508 Compliant, you will need to have a manual accessibility audit conducted. An audit will verify the level of accessibility of your digital properties. The good news? The revised Section 508 standards have been synched up to match the requirements of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. WCAG guidelines are now explicitly stated as the formal accessibility requirements. That simplifies things significantly: to verify if your organization’s website is compliant with Section 508, you need to test in accordance with these popular, well-established guidelines.
Any sufficient, comprehensive testing plan must include both automated and manual testing. Automated tests can be helpful but they cannot catch everything or apply the same subjective judgments that human testers can. In fact, such automated tests only run at about a 30% accuracy rate and can flag false positives, which can further throw your test results out of whack. The best approach is to work with a trained expert who will conduct both automated and manual testing.
Our Accessibility Team is composed of professional and skilled technicians who offer white glove support through the duration of the audit process. We pledge to not only help guide you through this process, but educate you and your team on accessibility along the way. We will get you prepared to maintain 508 compliance moving forward and ensure the creation of new accessible content.