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VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template)

Definition

A Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) is a standard-format document that describes how a product conforms to accessibility standards (typically WCAG 2.x A/AA and Section 508). Its audience is prospective customers — particularly government and enterprise buyers whose procurement rules require an a11y conformance statement.

From Slack's 2025-11-19 post: "A Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) is a document that outlines how well a product aligns with accessibility (a11y) standards. Its primary purpose is to inform customers about a product's a11y features, enabling them to make informed decisions before purchasing software."

Who produces it

VPATs are usually produced by third-party accessibility vendors (not the product team itself) to get an independent assessment. Slack engaged a third-party vendor in 2024 following the IA4 UI redesign. The vendor's output is a ticket list of findings classified by severity (Slack used P1/P2/P3 priorities and mapped each to the specific WCAG success criterion it violates, e.g. 4.1.2 Name Role Value Level A, 2.5.7 Dragging Movements Level AA, 1.4.1 Use of Color Level A).

What the engineering team does with it

The VPAT report is input to an a11y engineering backlog. The canonical triage workflow (see patterns/vpat-driven-a11y-triage):

  1. Shovel-ready fixes (colour contrast, missing image labels) — assigned out immediately for resolution.
  2. Recurring themes — cluster remaining tickets by underlying cause, resolve at the component-library layer (e.g. Slack Kit) so the fix propagates to every consumer.
  3. Platform-convention divergences — tickets that assume web semantics but are inappropriate for native platforms (WCAG 1.3.1 top-app-bar-title-as-heading; WCAG 1.3.1 strikethrough-announcement) get closed with a documented rationale citing platform-native convention. See concepts/wcag-platform-applicability-gap.
  4. Scope-bounded deferrals — tickets for criteria that don't apply to the current product surface (e.g. WCAG 2.1.1 keyboard navigation on a phone-only Android client) get explicitly marked as not-planned with rationale.
  5. Manual / community consultation — for ambiguous cases, consult the blind community or users with disabilities (Slack explicitly did this for the strikethrough decision).

Relationship to automated a11y testing

A VPAT is the manual / third-party / periodic layer in a broader a11y strategy. It complements — rather than replaces — automated a11y tooling like Axe Core, which runs continuously in CI and catches machine-decidable issues. See concepts/automated-vs-manual-testing-complementarity. At Slack, the 2024 VPAT and the 2022-launched automated Axe-in- Playwright CI suite (see [[sources/2025-01-07-slack-automated-accessibility-testing-at- slack]]) are two complementary layers of the same strategy.

Cadence

VPATs are typically re-conducted when the product undergoes significant UI changes or on a regular procurement-driven cadence. Slack's 2024 VPAT was triggered by the IA4 redesign. "While the timing of our next VPAT assessment is yet to be determined, we are committed to continuously evaluating and improving the accessibility of Slack across all platforms."

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