# A Vendor Accessibility Report Is Disclosure Not Certification ## Claim A vendor's accessibility report earns its place in procurement by showing where the product fails, so its value is that it discloses rather than that it certifies — and a vendor who produces none has told you something too. <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> ## Scope & conditions - Applies to procurement of any system where a capability is asserted by the seller and expensive for the buyer to verify. - Reframes the question from "does this vendor have a VPAT" to "what does their VPAT admit," which is the part that carries information. - Its presence is a weak positive signal about organizational maturity; its contents are the actual evidence. - Claims in it still need spot-testing — disclosure is not verification, only the precondition for it. - Breaks down where a report is produced purely as a sales artifact with no failures listed; an all-green report is a reason for more scrutiny, not less. ## Evidence > [!quote] ID:rw_scholtens_beyond_wcag > "that's one of the reasons why I love to see VPAT documentation from vendors. If they have even that, it shows that they are thinking about accessibility and it's going to show the good, the bad and the ugly of where they're at with all of the criteria. You can use that as your evidence" > [!quote] ID:rw_scholtens_beyond_wcag > "Require ACRs or VPATs during procurement. Verify claims with spot tests." Scholtens is answering a concrete scenario — three banking vendors, two with accessibility programs, and leadership leaning toward the third — and his answer is not that the report proves compliance but that it arms an internal argument. He is also candid about the limit of that power: "the best you can do is let your complaint be lodged. And you may not be able to change that decision." The second quote is from the episode's own summarized takeaways rather than his speech; treat it as the show's paraphrase. ## Links - [[3. Resources/MOCs/Accessibility & Disability Inclusion MOC]] — the procurement half of this map's stated gap - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/A Point-in-Time Conformance Report Cannot Certify a Continuously Changing System]] — the tempo limit on the same artifact; together they say what it is not and what it is - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Selecting Vendors on Clean Breach Records Rewards Non-Disclosure]] — the identical selection error in security: penalizing the vendor who admits problems - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Vendor Usage Anecdotes Need Verification Before Adoption Decisions]] — extends: vendor self-report is where verification starts, not where it ends ## Tests / falsifiers - Compare spot-test results against vendors' own reports across several procurements. Systematic understatement would mean the disclosure reading is too generous. - If buyers who require reports end up with measurably more accessible systems than those who spot-test without them, the artifact is doing more work than this note credits. ## Source - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Podcasts/Thinking Beyond WCAG and Compliance With Chris Scholtens]] — Chris Scholtens on the Accessibility Craft podcast. Practitioner advice from a director-level vantage; he names his own positional power as part of the answer.