WCAG 2.2 AA · Section 508 · EN 301 549
Their procurement team asked for your VPAT. You don’t have one.
Universities, hospitals and government buyers will not sign until you hand over an Accessibility Conformance Report. A consultancy takes four to eight weeks and $1,600 to five figures. Affido drafts a defensible one from your live product in an afternoon — and keeps it honest as you ship.
14-day trial, no card. One product, a full 55-criterion draft.
- planted defects found
- 36 of 37planted defects foundon our public demo site
- criteria evaluated, every scan
- 55criteria evaluated, every scanreported against WCAG 2.2, 2.1, EN 301 549 or Section 508
- found without a human
- 0 of 2found without a humanwhich is why we guide you through those
49 of 55
criteria a rule engine cannot settle alone
Only six are purely mechanical. The rest need judgement about meaning — is this alt text useful, is this link text descriptive out of context — or someone operating the product. That is what a VPAT costs money for.
4–8 weeks
to get an ACR from a consultancy
Plus $1,600 to five figures, because a VPAT needs a full audit behind it. Meanwhile the deal sits in procurement and your quarter closes without it.
Every release
is when your report goes stale
A report signed in March describes March's product. Affido re-tests on a schedule and tells you which rows no longer hold.
What actually happens when you point it at your product
- 01
It tests your product in a real browser
Chromium crawls your pages and runs axe-core, then measures the things a rule engine cannot: whether focus is actually visible when you tab, whether the layout still reflows at 320 pixels, whether targets are big enough to hit.
- 02
AI judges what a scanner can't
Every page goes to Claude with its resolved accessible names, label associations and surrounding text. It finds the alt text that says "image_04.jpg", the fourteen links that all say "learn more", the label that reads "Field 1" — and writes the replacement text for each one.
- 03
It interviews you about the rest
Captions, session timeouts, authentication puzzles: a crawler cannot see these. Affido drafts questions specific to your product — "I found a video on /tour with no caption track" — and turns your answers into attestable evidence.
- 04
You get a draft you can actually sign
Every Level A and AA criterion in your chosen standard, each with a conformance level and remarks citing the specific evidence. Edit any row. Export it as a VPAT 2.5 conformance report, or share a read-only link with the buyer.
What Affido will not do
It will not tell you that you are compliant. No software can, and in 2025 the FTC fined a vendor a million dollars for saying otherwise. Affido produces draft evidence: findings traced to specific elements, conformance rows you can edit, and an honest Not Evaluated wherever nothing was actually checked.
That is the point. A procurement officer has read enough boilerplate to know what it looks like. A report that names its own gaps is the one that gets accepted.
Pricing
Buy one report, or keep it current. Most people start with the first.
No subscription
Rush ACR
One report, no subscription. For the deal that is blocked right now.
- 1 product, 120 pages per scan
- Full conformance report against the standard your buyer asks for
- Scanning behind a login
- Guided manual verification
- PDF, HTML and a buyer link
- 30 days, three full re-scans as you fix things, unlimited report regeneration
- Credited against your first month if you subscribe
Or keep it current
Current
$249 / month
One product, and a report that stays true to it.
- 1 product
- 60 pages per scan, 400 per month
- Scanning behind a login, on desktop and mobile
- Weekly re-scan + drift alerts
- Guided manual verification
- VPAT 2.5 report — PDF, HTML and a buyer link
- Hosted accessibility statement
- Linked PDF checks, API access and the GitHub Action
- 10 buyer questionnaires per month
Most common
Team
$699 / month
Several products and a steady flow of procurement questionnaires.
- Everything in Current
- 3 products
- 120 pages per scan, 1,200 per month
- 30 buyer questionnaires per month
Agency
$1,499 / month
For teams attesting on behalf of clients.
- Everything in Team
- Unlimited products
- 200 pages per scan, 3,000 per month
- 120 buyer questionnaires per month
- White-labelled reports and statements
- Your logo, colour and contact on every document
Questions people ask before buying
What is a VPAT and why is a customer asking me for one?
A VPAT is a document stating how your product measures up against each accessibility requirement in WCAG, criterion by criterion. Filled in, it is called an Accessibility Conformance Report. Universities, hospitals and government agencies are required to consider accessibility when they buy software, so their procurement team asks every vendor for one — usually late in the deal, and usually with a deadline.
How much does a VPAT cost and how long does it take?
A defensible VPAT for a small product costs roughly $1,600 to $4,450 — an audit at $1,250 to $2,750 plus $350 to $950 for the report itself — and takes four to eight weeks. Mid-sized SaaS products run into five figures. Affido produces a draft from your live product in an afternoon for $999 as a one-off, or $249 a month to keep it current.
Can a VPAT be generated automatically, or do I need a consultant?
Partly. Automated testing settles only six of the 55 WCAG Level A and AA criteria outright; most of the rest turn on judgement — whether alt text is meaningful, whether link text makes sense out of context — and a handful need someone to operate the product. Affido automates the testing, uses AI for the judgement, and walks you through the few checks that need a person. It is a self-assessment, not an independent audit, and it says so on the report.
Should my VPAT cover WCAG 2.1 or WCAG 2.2?
It depends who is asking. HECVAT names WCAG 2.1 AA, as does the ADA Title II rule for state and local government. Section 508 references WCAG 2.0 AA, and EN 301 549 points at 2.1 AA for web content. Affido always evaluates against 2.2, which contains all of them, and reports against whichever standard you pick — so one scan answers every version of the question.
What is the accessibility section of the HECVAT and how do I answer it?
HECVAT is the questionnaire US universities send to software vendors, and its IT Accessibility tab has 18 questions (ITAC-01 to ITAC-18) covering your conformance status, your contact for accessibility issues, whether a VPAT exists and how recent it is, and whether a third party has audited you. Affido answers them from your evidence and resolves five of them from your own records, including the link to your accessibility statement and whether your report is less than twelve months old.
Do I need an accessibility statement as well as a VPAT?
Usually yes, and they are different documents. A VPAT is the criterion-by-criterion table procurement reviews; an accessibility statement is a public page on your own site saying how conformant you are, what is not yet fixed, and how to report a problem. HECVAT asks for a link to one, and the European Accessibility Act requires it. Affido hosts one that rebuilds itself from your current report so it cannot go stale.
Can an accessibility scanner test pages behind a login?
Affido can, four ways: it fills in your sign-in form, accepts pasted session cookies for SSO and two-factor, sends an API key header, or uses HTTP Basic. It matters because most of a SaaS product lives behind the login, and a report covering only the marketing site describes a product you do not sell. Use a dedicated read-only test account.
Will an accessibility overlay or widget protect me from a lawsuit?
No, and the evidence runs the other way. The FTC fined one overlay vendor $1 million in 2025 over claims that its product made sites compliant, and plaintiffs' firms now specifically look for overlays — over a fifth of 2025 digital accessibility lawsuits targeted sites running one. Affido does not install anything on your site; it finds the defects and tells you what to change in your own code.