Procuring New Content and Products at UNLV

Incoming digital content, software, and information and communications technology (ICT) products may need to be reviewed for accessibility prior to purchase, adoption, or renewal in accordance with UNLV’s Accessibility Policy and its associated Standards and Procedures.

To facilitate this review, the vendor may be asked to provide the accessibility documentation listed below. At the request of the Office of Accessibility Resources (OAR), vendors may also be asked to provide a test account or demonstration of the product for accessibility review. These reviews allow the OAR to test the software for compliance with the appropriate accessibility guidelines and standards, including the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level A & AA, provisions listed in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, and other standards where they apply to specific products, such as authoring tools or e-book publications.

Requirements for Vendors Working With UNLV Divisions

If you are an ICT vendor, be prepared to indicate the following:

  • Name of the UNLV faculty or staff member you are partnering with, at a minimum
  • Intended users of the product (student use, public use, or staff-only)
  • Contact at the UNLV Purchasing and Contracts Department, if applicable

If there is no existing process to procure for a particular course, project, department, or college, we can provide nominal information on how our department processes our portion of a procurement review.

Accessible Deliverables from Vendors

UNLV strives to be an inclusive environment. UNLV's vendors must create and provide contract deliverables that are digitally accessible and that conform to the expected Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and Section 508 standards. You don't have to know there's an individual with a disability; you do have to create content as if there is a person with a disability.

At UNLV, every internal and external website (including course sites) and any documents provided (such as but not limited to: PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, Word DOCX files, forms, etc.) are required to be digitally accessible. UNLV Web and Digital Strategy is only able to post accessible versions of PDFs and other digital documents. Content must be created with accessibility in mind and cannot be reliant on overlay technologies or "accessibility widgets" as these often interfere with the screen reader technology used by persons with disabilities.

All multimedia resources available to the general public and to UNLV's internal community must be appropriately captioned (i.e. human-correction and oversight are applied, not merely auto-generated). Text in the captioned media must be synchronized with a speaker's dialogue and include additional auditory information such as sound effects.

For questions or for further information, please contact the Office of Accessibility Resources at accessibilityresourceteam@unlv.edu.

Required Documentation For An Outright UNLV ICT Procurement Approval

The OAR seeks up to three documents as part of its full accessibility vetting process:

An accessibility statement is the vendor’s declaration about their commitment to digital accessibility. A useful accessibility statement should mention standards and guideline benchmarks, as well as a contact email address, phone, or similar contact link.

W3C provides a primer on what a useful accessibility statement should include and why. 

For examples of useful vendor’s corporate accessibility statements, also called accessibility commitment statements or Section 508 compliance pages, visit the following pages:

  1. Adobe Accessibility Statement
  2. Apple Accessibility Statement
  3. White House Accessibility Statement
  4. Zoom Accessibility Statement

A VPAT is a templated accessibility conformance report that documents the results of accessibility testing on a product by internal review or third-party testing. The VPAT document indicates which accessibility guidelines were supported or not supported by the product at the time of review. Many companies have this document available to prospective clients upon request or have it published on a public website. They have an updated schedule to revisit the document at intervals between six months and a year.

Elements of a Useful VPAT

  • Updated regularly to reflect the current status of the product
  • Based on either of the current Accessibility guidelines:
  • Indicate when the results were considered current
  • Indicate what portion of a vendor's product(s) or service(s) was reviewed
  • Indicate how the results were found (i.e., by internal testing or by a third party who reviewed the product)

For UNLV staff, a VPAT is a great place to start the conversation about accessibility with a vendor, as it offers a “snapshot” of the product or service at the time of review. Still, more information is likely required to continue procurement, especially where purchasing contracts are involved. For more information, visit the Procurement and Purchasing for Accessibility Conformance page.

VPATs or accessibility conformance reports (ACRs) must be usefully completed and must be current. ACRs/VPATs using the most current and applicable template format are expected. VPATs older than January 1, 2020 are no longer viable in our review process. The U.S. Government's Section508.gov Accessibility Conformance Report/Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT®) Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page explains many of the compliance details related to this crucial documentation required for procurement.

UNLV is not the originator of this VPAT document. The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) provides the same document, used around the country and the world, for completion. Additionally, the U.S. Government’s Section 508 FAQs provide additional information about what and why vendors must provide to support UNLV’s requirements for accessibility conformance reporting.

An accessibility roadmap serves as a gap analysis when an existing VPAT is significantly outdated. A roadmap will be required, along with an accessibility statement, to ensure that long-term “to-be-fixed” accessibility concerns are on a plan set forth by the vendor for the product(s) in question.

A roadmap is not typically required for routine procurements but can be used as a gap analysis when an existing VPAT is significantly outdated. It is not a substitute for a missing VPAT. However, it can be used as a fixes-to-completed interim version for a VPAT that does not use the VPAT 2.3 version of the format and/or was last completed before March 2018. VPATs completed with an older format or before March 2018 do not provide reporting in the current form.

For an RFP-based, multi-year commitment, OAR seeks and can approve a product-specific VPAT no older than January 1, 2021, along with either a standalone accessibility statement or the appropriate items for "accessibility" affirmatively acknowledged and noted in a recent full HECVAT (Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit) spreadsheet. For year-to-year subscriptions, renewals, purchases, etc., OAR reviews requests and processes at least annually, as VPATs have a shelf life. As of August 2024, any VPAT/accessibility conformance report older than March 2020 is not valid for a "Plan A" accessibility approval (accessibility statement plus per-product VPAT).

Obtaining Documentation From a Vendor

If the Accessibility Resources Team (ART) cannot independently find at least an accessibility statement plus an accessibility roadmap or a current, valid VPAT or ACR, it will research the nature of a product or products being sought for procurement. Upon request, the team has a formal email that they will send to the vendor. This email will request all necessary documents.

When To Start Obtaining Documentation From Vendor(s)

Because this documentation can take time and some vendors may have questions about accessibility terminology or UNLV accessibility policies, we recommend including the ART as early as possible in the procurement process.

  • The ART prefers that you submit your request at least 30 days before a new requisition request or a renewal for an existing subscription/license to allow processing, inquiring, reviewing, and any necessary testing.
  • While 15 days can be workable, this can lead to possible overdue invoices.
  • A five-day turnaround time is generally unreasonable and difficult to meet, especially if documentation is lacking, the vendor is unaware of accessibility, or testing is needed. This scenario will most likely lead to overdue invoices.

The ART can begin consulting on accessibility requirements at the beginning of the contract or purchasing negotiations, help to evaluate multiple products you are researching, or assist with including accessibility evaluation as a part of the Request for Purchase (RFP) process.

Available Exception Process for Incomplete or Missing Documentation

In many cases, the vendor cannot provide the minimal accessibility documentation of a corporate accessibility statement as well as product-specific VPATs. The exception process, called an alternate access plan (AAP), requires additional paperwork.

Alternative Access Plan (AAP) and Exception Request

If it is not technically possible to make the ICT you are procuring accessible, or if doing so would require a fundamental alteration or would result in undue financial and administrative burdens, or if the vendor lacks the accessibility documentation necessary to make a determination of the accessibility of the ICT, an AAP and Exception Request must be completed and approved in order for the ICT to be procured.

  1. Email Accessibility Resources Team Support to discuss the anticipated requisition. We can discuss the request and the related paperwork, including the template for the AAP exception. The user/requestor must be willing to complete this additional process and related paperwork.
  2. A request for the AAP process will be made and should include the contact information for the department user of the product, as well as the department contact who will be processing the purchase.
  3. After a nominal approval is granted to move the purchase forward, the exception paperwork for the AAP must be completed and signed promptly.

Our team will provide a DOCX-based form where the requestor or their designee will provide:

  1. Contact information for the requestor or their designee
  2. Information about the product to be procurement
    1. Type of product (app, software, cloud-based/web-based product, all of the above)
    2. Name of vendor and product (include the version number if applicable)
    3. Product description
    4. Product purpose (what product-specific outcomes are to be achieved by using this product, even if other products are available for which the necessary documentation is already available)
  3. Answers to the following questions about how alternate access will be provided:
    1. Description of the issue (what issues around accessibility documentation exists and/or what existing accessibility concerns have already been noted)
    2. Persons or groups affected (who are the parties to be affected by the use of the product as well as by the output of the product, if it is a content-creation tool)
    3. Responsible persons (who is the point-of-contact for the alternate access process in the unit and the person(s) who will implement the alternate access plan.
    4. How will the alternate access be provided (what is the scenario for the implementation of the alternate access; extra information about alternate access specifics can be attached to the form)
    5. Alternate access resources required (what training, equipment, additional staffing, etc., would be required to support the scenario described in the preceding entry)
    6. Repair information (in the absence of documentation from the vendor, how will the department proceed with workarounds requiring more than UNLV-provided staffing or intervention)
    7. Timeline for unforeseen events (how soon would the unit/department be ready to provide responses to requested workarounds and committing to a workaround in the absence of vendor-supported fixes)
  4. Administrative AAP Approvals
    1. Name, title, and signature for the department or project contact (person overseeing the implementation of the AAP)
    2. Name, title, and signature of the executive (dean, associate dean, vice president or vice provost)

Technology Procurement (Purchasing) Training

The Accessibility Resources Team (ART) is part of the purchasing vetting process when you plan to purchase, subscribe to, and/or license the following:

  • Apps
  • Datasets
  • Databases
  • Software
  • Web-based resources
  • Portals

Upon request, the ART provides a one-hour training on accessibility procurement processes. ART can also provide you with information regarding the basic required paperwork from vendors and what exceptions are available.

In-Progress Accessibility Documentation Review Requests

Please allow up to five (5) business days to process your initial procurement request. Incomplete, incorrect, or missing information or documentation can extend processing, review and/or approval times.

Contact the Office of Accessibility Resources

Please email the OAR at accessibilityresourceteam@unlv.edu for information regarding the UNLV ICT Accessibility Policy to begin the process of Accessibility Review or to discuss concerns about procuring, purchasing, or adopting digital content.

Other Procurement Process Examples

As accessibility becomes an essential part of education nationwide and globally, the UNLV Office of Accessibility Resources monitors and keeps in contact with our accessibility colleagues. Below are some examples of the accessibility procurement process at other universities which are similar to our process at UNLV: