Complete a VPAT
A Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) is a free template where you record the accessibility of your ebooks on a table. They are not a legal requirement and do not need to be published openly, but they help to communicate with libraries about the accessibility of your ebooks. It is completed at the whole publisher level rather than on the individual book level. This is the sole use case for a VPAT - to communicate accessibility to readers you would use book level information which is captured by metadata and DAISY reports. For more information on that see:
There is one row for each WCAG requirement, ordered by how strict they are A, AA and AAA. For each requirement, you give yourself a rating on this scale:
- Supports = the ebooks meet this requirement
- Partially Supports = the ebooks meet this requirement some of the time
- Does Not Support = the ebooks don't meet this requirement most of the time
- Not Applicable = this requirement is not relevant to the ebooks
- Not Evaluated = used on AAA requirements when you are only describing up to AA
There is also space to add more details of why you have given this rating, if you feel this is needed.
Our recommendations:
- Complete the WCAG VPAT template (other templates are available)
- Complete one VPAT for your whole press
- Only complete the VPAT for your ebooks, not the website, which is called Electronic Docs on the VPAT. If appropriate, you could split your notes into 'PDFs' and 'EPUBs' or some other meaningful way of dividing the service up, if there are very different accessibility issues.
- The VPAT does say 'Electronic Docs' where it would apply to static files, but still even more of them might not apply to your particular ebooks e.g. audio visual material
- Only complete the VPAT up to level AA, and mark the AAA requirements as not evaluated
- Use your own knowledge of your workflows to complete the initial VPAT, rather than doing full testing
- Update the VPAT annually as you complete testing and progress through your accessibility improvements
Example of a completed VPAT from Open Book Publishers
We have produced this document that describes each WCAG success criteria in plain language that is relevant to small presses. VPATs in plain language
We also produced more detailed guidance and collated training about VPATs in the long term.