Episode 18 – 2026 Mid-Year Report, Accessibility Roles, and VPAT Transparency

Episode Summary

Mark Miller and Justin Stockton break down three accessibility pieces that connect the dots between litigation trends, organizational staffing, and the practical politics of sharing conformance information. The conversation matters because it shows how accessibility failures are still showing up at scale, why one accessibility hire is rarely enough, and why VPATs and accessibility statements are as much about trust as they are about compliance.

In this episode:

Mark and Justin discuss three accessibility pieces and what they signal for the industry right now.

1. 2026 Mid-Year Report: ADA Title III Federal Lawsuit Numbers Are Climbing
   Minh N. Vu, Kristina M. Launey and Susan M. Ryan
   • Title III federal accessibility lawsuits are still climbing year over year, with the biggest volume concentrated in California, Florida, and New York.
   • Why lawsuits keep increasing: The hosts point to two main drivers—organizations still keep shipping inaccessible websites, and AI is accelerating the amount of content and code being produced.
   • Shift-left remains the real fix: They argue that accessibility has to be built into development from the start rather than patched in after launch.
2. 7 Digital Accessibility Roles to Fill in 2027
   Onward Accessibility
   • Accessibility is not one job: The Onward Accessibility article is used to show that accessibility work spans technical, strategic, planning, auditing, and project-management functions.
   • One person is not the whole program: A single accessibility hire may be a good start, but many organizations need consultants or multiple roles to cover gaps.
3. If you have to ask, is it accessible?
   George Joeckel
   • VPAT vs. ACR clarified: George Joeckel’s article explains that VPAT is the template, while ACR is the completed conformance report.
   • Why companies withhold VPATs: The discussion covers three stated reasons—customization, competitive concerns, and getting the “correct” version for different markets or standards.
   • Legal risk and transparency: Mark and Justin note that some organizations may avoid publishing VPATs publicly because listing gaps can feel like inviting litigation.
   • Accessibility statements may be the better public-facing choice: For websites, they suggest a well-crafted accessibility statement can be more appropriate than posting a full VPAT.
   • Ed Tech Directory: George’s article also points to an emerging education technology accessibility directory, which could be especially useful as Title II and related deadlines approach.

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Transcript

Mark Miller (00:01)
Hey, welcome to the Accessibility Breakdown. I am Mark, and this is

Justin Stockton (00:05)
Justin.

Mark Miller (00:06)
every week we pay tribute to those who stand out to us as leading by accessibility by picking three topics that strike us in some way. This week we’re gonna talk about the 2026 Mid Year Report. this is an ADA Title II Federal Lawsuit Numbers, which are climbing. Bury the lead a little bit there. and that is Minvoo

Christina, Lonnie and Susan Ryan. so those are all they’re all lawyers at Seyfarth and then 7 Digital Roles to Fill in 2027 all about different accessibility roles that are appropriate in companies and kind of how that should look today this is a post by Onward Accessibility and then we’re also gonna talk about If you had to ask

Is it accessible? And this is by George and you’re gonna have to help me with this last this last name.

Justin Stockton (01:09)
Which one?

Mark Miller (01:10)
Joe

Ik Joeckel.

Justin Stockton (01:14)
Geor George Joeckel.

Mark Miller (01:17)
Joeckel. I’m trying to pronounce that. J is a G. George Joeckel.

Justin Stockton (01:24)
I’m gonna

that’s a that’s a serious guess. So, George, if we butchered that, we’re very sorry.

Mark Miller (01:29)
Yeah.

Well you’re supposed to get right, Justin. I’m the one who’s supposed to butcher names. It’s it’s

Justin Stockton (01:34)
That’s if if I saw that on someone’s name tag, that’s how I would pronounce it.

Mark Miller (01:38)
pronounce it. Okay. Well, you’re way better than me. so let’s start with this report, 2026 Mid-Year Report: called ADA Title III Federal Lawsuit Numbers Are Climbing. And this is by the folks over at Sh Seyfarth. and it basically

shows

that the that lawsuits are increasing or are greater at this time this year than they were last year. I think is probably really the way to say it. and the title three specificity, just for those of you who may be like, what is this all about? So the ADA has multiple titles and those titles have different rules and regulations and all sorts of things in them, right? But they point

In different directions as well. So what I mean by that is, for example, Title III points to public accommodations. So think if if you think of it physically, think about your library, your bank, places that you the your your local physical environment. Whereas something like title two

Justin Stockton (02:49)
Back in the day that’s what Target

got sued on.

Mark Miller (02:53)
Piggly

Justin Stockton (02:54)
Target? Yeah.

Lot people remember the target case as being kind of like one of the

Mm-hmm. Piggly Wiggly.

Mark Miller (03:08)
Wiggly. And there’s and there’s kind of a a early in the day in the Title III days, there was this question as to whether or not the web was covered, which today it is covered. Just don’t get confused.

And a lot of that was they were trying to create these nexuses. So they so if you had so if Target had a website because website had a physical location, the courts were determining that their website also had to be accessible. But t today it’s pretty clear that your website has to be accessible. That’s no longer through a couple of different

Clarifications, it’s it’s thing. But anyways, we’re getting we’re getting a little off here. The so just as another example, Title II, Title II points to state and local government things, right? So from a digital standpoint, if your town has a website, a local college has a website, right, versus a university might be covered by federal regulations versus title two. and

So on and so forth. So this is really those public facing things. So think your retail stores and all all of that from a web standpoint. So th things that are serving the public on the web. and that’s where we’ve seen a lot of these lawsuits happen in the past. It’s been a big discussion over the years with in and and phenomenon over the years with

digital accessibility, particularly once these clarifications came in. And it’s been going on for a while, Justin, right? You would you would think I I think that the thing that people keep going is like this has got to stop sometime. Like how w w you know are we gonna how like how long could we just keep suing people for their website and accessibility? And I think what we’re learning is a long time. You know.

Justin Stockton (05:10)
Well, yeah,

it there’s I don’t know. You can kind of look at it as, you know, you know, more people being sued means that, you know, more websites will be accessible. Like we’re you know, we’re using the law to the the stick of the law, so to speak, to make the web more accessible. Hooray, that’s awesome. The the

Mark Miller (05:29)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Stockton (05:30)
other side of that is, wow, we’re we’re increasing the number of websites, we’re increasing the number of lawsuits being brought.

people just aren’t getting it. but that said, like if there’s a really interesting graph or chart as part of this this article, and right now you know, what they’re comparising is is if they look back at 2025, you know, right now we’re only there’s only a nine percent uptick between the halfway point between twenty twenty-six and where we were at this same time in twenty twenty-five.

And from twenty twenty five to twenty twenty four, it was only a seven percent uptick. So, you know, yes, they are getting worse. What’s not it’s not a huge discrepancy, but yes, year over year we are the trend line is starting to move up.

Mark Miller (06:25)
It’s not slowing down. I think that’s the message is it’s not

Justin Stockton (06:27)
Yeah, it’s absolutely that.

Mark Miller (06:28)
slowing down. I mean, even if it was staying level, it’s not slowing down. So th and this is you know, people wonder why this continues to happen and I think the answer’s twofold and pretty straightforward. One, we keep building inaccessible websites. Like that’s just continues to go on.

And I was we was I I actually was on Steve Faulkner’s podcast. We just recorded this morning, f the fire side chat revisited, re I can’t remember what he says, but re redone. Started over again. Yeah.

Justin Stockton (07:02)
Did he instart did he in

fact start the fire side chat?

Mark Miller (07:08)
we didn’t start the fire. But the so anyways, he and I were talking about this and the the the from that standpoint, right, if you think of how the velocity in which we create content on the web, right? More websites, more applications, it’s not only is that fast, not only is that increasing, it’s taken a huge jump because of AI.

AI is of course informed by what humans did in the past, and we as humans made a bunch of inaccessible websites in the past. So it’s kind of like a force multiplier of putting stuff out there. And then you have the fact that you know, a lot of these lawsuits are sort of tort law efforts, and there’s just money to be made by doing these lawsuits. And you can, you know, I’m not gonna put any judgment around that in this podcast, but different people have different feelings about that.

Justin Stockton (08:07)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Miller (08:08)
You know, it can be you can look at it as a good thing because websites are more websites are becoming accessible. You can also look at it as, you know, it’s a money grab, right? But whatever the circumstance, and not all lawsuits are of that nature. There’s a lot out there that are s very sincere as well. But those are the two things I think that contribute. If you change one of them significantly, then you might see a change in this number. The change

That would have to happen.

To ultimately affect this number, and this is what Steve and I talk about today, is you would have to, this soapbox that we as accessibility professionals are always on about shifting left or integrating accessibility into your development, that’s what has to happen. We have to build things with accessibility versus trying to fix the things that are built after they’re built. That is kind of a

losing strategy if it were if we were really looking at making things on the web more accessible in large numbers and kind of reducing the numbers around this. So anyways, that’s my that’s my take on on that.

Justin Stockton (09:25)
Yeah, no, it was this was an it I one of the th things I want to point out is that this was an interesting article because it also points out where these lawsuits or a lot of them are being filed.

Mark Miller (09:35)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Stockton (09:37)
easily I think a two thirds of them are being filed in California. and then

Mark Miller (09:45)
Yeah. New York’s another big big area.

Justin Stockton (09:48)
yeah, Florida.

The they did note that one of the interesting things is that because of some recent changes within the within the state of New York, that a lot of they they’ve seen a decrease in the number of federal lawsuits that are being submitted in New York,

Mark Miller (10:09)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Stockton (10:10)
because of some local statute changes and the courts there trying to push those down into the into the state courts and keeping them out of the federal courts. So

Mark Miller (10:19)
Yeah, that’s

interesting.

Justin Stockton (10:21)
There’s so there technically could be more of these if New York was was being counted here. So

Mark Miller (10:31)
yeah.

Bottom

line, there’s still a lot of work to do.

Justin Stockton (10:37)
yeah. Yeah. Well that that’s

Mark Miller (10:39)
Alright, anything else? go ahead.

Justin Stockton (10:42)
No, I was gonna say that’s a good s kind of changeover to the next topic.

Mark Miller (10:48)
The segu a segue. Do we do segues? I don’t even know that we do we do segues?

Justin Stockton (10:49)
A good segue. Segway. No, I

Mark Miller (10:54)
We should we should make it a habit. Let’s try it. So let’s let me let me try to redo this as a segue. Are you ready? Okay.

The one thing I know, Justin, is there’s still a lot of work to do. Work that may work that we may work that we may need more peoples and more invariant roles within organizations to accomplish. That leads

Justin Stockton (11:23)
Yeah.

Mark Miller (11:24)
us to our next article. What do you think? That was a pro transition right there. That leads

Justin Stockton (11:28)
That was a great transition. Bravo.

Mark Miller (11:30)
us to our next article. 7 digital accessibility roles to

Fill

in 2027. This is by Onward Accessibility. and I would say that if anybody’s gonna write this article, it should be Onward because Onward is a staffing company. This is a d Onward Accessibility is a division or part of the same group that’s the Onward Staffing Company so they truly understand you know, different roles and different organizations and and all that kind of thing.

Do you wanna lay the groundwork for this one? I put a lot of work into that transition, so I feel like maybe you should lay the groundwork.

Justin Stockton (12:12)
Yeah, I think it was I think it was a good transition and it certainly set set it up. now this article is I thought was interesting because it outlines a number of roles in and around digital accessibility and the types of requests that a company like Onward is getting for these types of niche roles. but I I also like that they also kind of open this whole their article with like

There’s this kind of idea that with digital accessibility, they’re like, you do a digital accessibility. Then you can do, you know, product placement, you can do strategy, you can do auditing, you can also do the software development work. You can they’re like, No, no, no, no, no. Like these are all different roles. and so they call out what those different role roles are and talk about how they’re you know, if you’re

trying to expand accessibility within your organization, these are some of the places where you should be so should be looking.

Mark Miller (13:17)
Yeah. And I think it’s an important I think it’s an important concept. And I think so there’s there’s a couple of th things that they go into, right? They go into these sort of seven seven different roles. And I’m not gonna list them all, but they’re kind of in the spirit of what you just said, right? Some of them are technical roles, some of them are planning roles, some of them are strategic roles. they’re just as varied as you would think, and as varied as anything else would be.

and so there’s a concept you mentioned where people see that you have accessibility experience and they’re like, come do everything, right?

Justin Stockton (13:52)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Miller (13:52)
and that may not necessarily be what you can do. And they also make this other good point that it it also doesn’t necessarily mean that you need all of these roles, right? That you actually have to look at the organization, its size, how it’s structured, what it’s doing, that there’s considerations

It to determining which roles you really need. And I think that the what I would say here is I I I I like that sentiment, right? I like the overall sentiment of a person with accessibility experience isn’t necessarily going to be the person you need for every aspect of accessibility. Whether or not you need to hire for that, like you might have somebody who’s high-level strategic, got some project management.

and has accessibility knowledge in there and they could hire a third party to do auditing and this is this is a circumstance I think that we see all the time. So you don’t necessarily need to go like, well, I need an auditor too. Well if you’re if you’re doing five audits through the course of the year, full-time auditing might not make sense.

Right. No matter how so how big you are. So some of these roles and some of these functions can certainly be handled other ways. They don’t necessarily have to be fully hired roles. And I just that should also in my mind be taken into consideration when you’re really looking at this. But it always goes back to Justin that you have to have the person with the right accessibility knowledge to help you even sort through that sometimes. And I think that’s a big point of the article is that a lot of organizations aren’t

they don’t know what they don’t know. You know, so to start off

Justin Stockton (15:39)
It’s buying a house.

Mark Miller (15:40)
with a consultant might be a good idea too.

Justin Stockton (15:43)
Well, and you know, that going going back to our previous thing. Like if if you’re an organization and you didn’t know about accessibility, you didn’t know to have your developers shift left and bake accessibility

Mark Miller (15:54)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Stockton (15:55)
in at all these things. You know, even though the developers may have known it and someone may have said, Hey, wait, what about this accessibility thing? They’re like, We don’t know what that is. Delivery dates the requirement, ship it, you know?

Mark Miller (16:06)
Okay.

Justin Stockton (16:08)
so I mean it’s it’s circular, like and that’s

Mark Miller (16:11)
Yeah.

Justin Stockton (16:11)
why there’s no

Like you can’t I don’t think you can necessarily pin the lack of accessibility in on, you know, in a delivered product on any one person. It’s a systemic failure. And so hopefully by hiring roles like the ones that are outlined in this article, you can head off some of that systemic failure. You can bring in people who know about accessibility, who can perform an audit if you’ve got a l a suite of products, then you can

have them auditing. You can bring in a strategist to help figure out where the different

Mark Miller (16:47)
Right.

Justin Stockton (16:47)
roles should be and how you should be f thinking about accessibility as you’re developing, as you’re, you know, figuring things out of what to build. So

Mark Miller (16:58)
Yeah, I think that you know, the caution I would throw here is that is not to let perfect be the enemy of good, right? Like you if you only can hire one person and they understand accessibility, do that, right? Don’t look at this article and be like, well, we’re c we can’t do all this. and and don’t throw them in front of the bus, right? I think the real

Justin Stockton (17:19)
Mm. But also don’t throw them in front of the proverbial bus, like and make them do all the jobs.

Mark Miller (17:27)
I think the real the exactly, right? I think you you you just made my point, right? The real lesson out of this article is that

one person’s probably not gonna have you know if you’re a small company maybe they come close, right? But one person’s probably not gonna have everything that you need. So maybe you do hire one person, but then you might need a good consultant to fill in some of the gaps for that person. So you put a consultant alongside that person. You could have a team of five. I mean we do we consult

inside of large accessibility teams with great accessibility knowledge and we come in and fill those gaps. but that accessibility is not it’s not like you know being a project manager and having your black belt, right? Like that’s that’s a thing and it’s specific to being a project manager and

But it’s accessibility’s not like that. It’s sort of the opposite where you actually need a project manager that knows accessibility. You need, you know. So, anyways. I think we’ve got that figured out. And if you would like, I can take a stab at another transition.

Justin Stockton (18:39)
Ooh.

Mark Miller (18:39)
Do you want me to do that? I have to think about it though. I think you I’m supposed to be so good I don’t have to think about it, but I’m gonna have to think about this one.

So

the the question is that once you have all these people, right, and you’re doing accessibility right, how do you communicate that accessibility to the rest of the world? And if the rest of the

Justin Stockton (19:01)
By not being food.

Mark Miller (19:02)
world has to ask you if you’re accessible, if you’re holding that information back, that could be a problem too, which is exactly

Justin Stockton (19:08)
Only there was

Mark Miller (19:10)
what our next article talks about. Let me finish my transition. What our next article talks about, if you have to ask, is it accessible? by George.

Now

you can jump in because I can’t pronounce the last name.

Justin Stockton (19:21)
Joeckel

Mark Miller (19:22)
Joeckel.

Justin Stockton (19:24)
So we’re gonna

cons George again, we apologize if we’re butchering your name. We’re going to consistently butcher it and then we’ll we’ll fix it next time. Yes. but

Mark Miller (19:30)
Yeah. Butcher it with consistency.

Justin Stockton (19:36)
yes, yes. if only if only there was a voluntary way for someone to, you know, provide information about their accessibility. Maybe it came in some sort of template format. Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Miller (19:47)
Like a like a template. Yeah, like an accessibility template.

Justin? A volun a voluntary accessibility template. I’ve

Justin Stockton (19:57)
you forgot the P.

Mark Miller (19:58)
vol we’ve messed it up. A voluntary product accessibility template. I did,

Justin Stockton (20:02)
I bumped and you whiffed.

Mark Miller (20:07)
right? He put that right over the plate and I just I let go of the bat and everything. It’s gone.

Voluntary product accessibility template, which is the template in which you can use to fill out an accessibility conformance report, also known as an ACR. Yeah, George does go into the difference between an ACR and a VPAT, and he’s and he says those two terms are used interchangeably. VPAT is actually the template. ACR is what you get. It could be a lot of things, but an ACR in the VPAT format is

What

you get once you fill out that VPAT. And the I think the point there’s a couple of good so you talks a little bit about the VPAT and the ACR, which is interesting, but the point that George is making here is like it’s kind of r it’s it is it is an interesting phenomenon, and I didn’t stop to think about it.

And tell and George, this is to your credit here, like d I read this article and thought about it in the way that George laid it all out. But organizations can be very like close to the vest. Like they keep these V pads hidden on their inside pocket and then you’ve got to ask sometimes to see it, particularly for products.

And then he does this really interesting thing where he goes to AI and he says, Why ask AI, like, why do you think companies are doing this? And AI comes up with a bunch of reasons. And through the article, George kind of

defends

or or or handles those reasons like you would handle an ob objection. and I have one that he didn’t come up with that we’ll get into, but I wanna see if you have any. do you? Maybe it’s the same one. You think it’s the

Justin Stockton (21:57)
Well I have one too. I bet I bet it’s the same one. I bet it’s

Mark Miller (22:01)
same one? Okay. So do you want to talk about some of the objections that he or reasons that he had put in there or you want to jump to see if we’re

Justin Stockton (22:10)
Yeah, so the three reasons

that he that he came up with were cases where the VPAT may contain cus require customized information for for the vendor. So maybe where bas maybe you’ve got like some sort of self hosted or on site or on prem piece of software and based on configuration or anything like that, the VPAT should be scoped.

based on kind of how you’re using it. And so they don’t want to give out a V they don’t wanna give you their VPAT or ACR until they know more information about how you’re gonna configure it. So that that’s a I I agree with one I agree with George. All of these are silly reasons to withhold a a VPAT. but that one to me is kind of the the

more interesting ones because that just says like, well, we haven’t finished building accessibility into our entire product and we don’t want to talk about things that you may not be using and open ourselves up. Like, but that’s what a VPAT is all supposed to be about. It’s supposed to be open. It’s the voluntary, it’s the V in the voluntary part of the templates acronym.

Mark Miller (23:35)
yeah, I think that one sort of directly relates back to his title, which I really liked his title too, if you have to ask, is it accessible? And I think that

Justin Stockton (23:43)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Miller (23:43)
that’s what that’s all about, is like, yeah, you know, we don’t want to give it to you because of some things are custom and you know, it might and it’s like, all right, well what you’re saying is that it’s not accessible, you’re not quite sure. There’s a bunch of ways you can handle that, right? Create a VPAT on the base product.

And you gotta have a disclaimer, like you change this stuff, we would have to look you know, if if accessibility is important and you need a VPAD on what you finally get, we have to look at your custom version and create a new VPAT once it’s been customized. And that’s something that you can work out with a customer, but there’s nothing stopping you from having a VPAT on that base product. And if by customize you mean we have a few different versions of this,

Justin Stockton (24:25)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Miller (24:25)
as it’s appropriate.

So where you’re using different tools, techniques, content types, interactions from one version to the other that don’t i exist in both, then that’s another another VPAT or the VPAT that you fill out should acknowledge the two versions or or or whatever, right? There’s a couple of different ways you could you could tackle it. but it did that one made me think like, yeah, if if that’s your excuse, it probably means you’re not that accessible. So

Justin Stockton (24:56)
Yeah.

Exactly. The other one the next one was competitive information and that, you know, as an organization you may you may say like, well, we require an NDA to give you in place in order to give you our VPAT because it contains proprietary information. And that w again, like it’s all about accessibility. There’s your VPAT

Does not need to include anything about functionality or anything like that. I mean, it doesn’t have to be it can be videos do not contain captions. It does not have to be this video about this groundbreaking piece of technology that we’ve developed that shows in intricate detail everything about how our company works does not contain captions. Like it doesn’t have to be it doesn’t have to be that specific. so that one this one

Mark Miller (25:46)
Right. Yeah. Yeah, that that

one was just kind of I mean, I almost wondered if that was a real thing and then he he shows this thing from the California State University San Marcos that directly says on their vendor requirements page we do not sign NDAs for a VPAT. So then I was like, wait a minute, people are

are looking at VPATs that way and they shouldn’t be, because you just shouldn’t there’s no need to and you shouldn’t be putting proprietary information on your VPAT. Full stop. And I just found it w it was interesting to me that there was a whole university that had such a problem with it they they had a statement about it on their website. Right?

Justin Stockton (26:40)
Yeah.

Yeah, I thought that was really odd too. I did like that there I did like this statement, but what’s interesting about of the three of these, this was the first this was one of the f first times well, wait. Let me fra rephrase that.

Of the three scenarios that he presents, this is the one that I ran into first in the wild, and like in my history, career, whatever. and it was with it was about eighteen months or so ago. I ran into this while researching like different AI, and Anthropic had this on their website in order to access their I think what they call it was their trust center in order to pull down, you know.

information about, you know, some of the like whether they were SOC2 compliant or HIPAA and all the or all those different things. In order to access this documentation, you had to sign an NDA first. And I remember at the time I sent it over to our good friend David Sloan, who’s the s chief accessibility officer at Fispero now. And

Mark Miller (27:52)
This bar, yeah.

Justin Stockton (27:53)
I was like, would you look at this? And so yeah.

Mark Miller (27:56)
And also a fantastic podcaster, by the way. Just

plugging David’s a little bit.

Justin Stockton (27:59)
And so he in his

C Ao CAO capacity, you know, reached out and started talking to them about some s you know, some stuff. so hopefully that’s now accessible. Wait, lowercase accessible on the anthropic website that you can actually download their ACR and not require an NDA. But

Mark Miller (28:16)
Yeah.

Justin Stockton (28:17)
that was the one that I was like, Yep, I’ve hit that one before.

Mark Miller (28:21)
Yeah, that’s interesting. I don’t know that I have but that’s interesting that you have. So what’s the there’s one more, right?

Justin Stockton (28:28)
Yep. the third one was correct information. and this is kind of the the the justification here is an organization that doesn’t publish their ACRs on their website or make them you know readily available because they they do they do work you know all over the world and there’s lots of different laws and different things all over the world and we want to make sure that our customers receive the information that

the best suits them. So, you know, maybe if that in the US, if you’re depending on how you’re purchasing, maybe that’s just the WCAG version of the of an of the ACR. Maybe if you’re a US federal agency, maybe that’s the 508. If you’re international, it could be the international template. So so on so forth. But all that does is it just says like, like why are you having all these different ones if you do work internationally?

Just fill out the international D bod and then everything is covered.

Mark Miller (29:27)
The I the INT, yeah.

Well, and it’s also just not like if all you had was the WCAG one, right? Or the five

Justin Stockton (29:38)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Miller (29:38)
we’ll the five eight one is a better example. And somebody in Europe

Justin Stockton (29:41)
Well, let’s be honest too,

if the only one that you’ve probably paid a third party to put together for you is the five eight one or the VPA or the WCAG one.

Mark Miller (29:52)
Right. Exactly. And but if you’re in in in Europe, it’s not like you grab that ACR and you’re confused about what it is. You go, this thing was done for five eight, it points to WCAG point one, it doesn’t wick point to WCAG two point two, and it doesn’t consider the EAA standards. Like it’s that that’s to me why that was kind of a non-argument is I’m like it’s it’s like any other document that’s specific to something. It’s specific to that, it says it’s specific to that and and

But just not a reason. And I do think that

I

think that the title, I think it all goes back to the title, if you have to ask, is it accessible? And the reason why I think that that is so profound is because somebody who understands accessibility and somebody who somebody, some organization that understands accessibility and that truly does a sincere effort around creating accessible products and websites would know better than all those reasons. And

confidently put out an appropriate statement. So the fact that you have to ask not

It’s almost better. It’s almost like I almost feel like if they just didn’t have a VPAP because they didn’t know they needed one, that would be a little bit more you would you would be you would meet them where they are a little bit easier than yeah, we’ve got a VPAP, but we’re not gonna show it to you unless you sign an NDA or by request or whatever. That starts to raise like that to me is that red flag raising kind of activities. So and it’s not and it’s and I will caveat that to say that I think

The reason a lot of these things exist is because those organizations don’t know accessibility well enough. Because they don’t, not because of anything accessible. As we discussed, like, you know, organizations don’t even necessarily have all the right people in place. because it’s hard to understand. They don’t know what they don’t know, and that makes them nervous, right? That that that degrades their confidence, and it’s a lack of confidence that causes them to hold it.

inside until they let it out. So it’s not in my mind that there’s an intentional

deceitful

thing going on. It’s just people, organizations are still trying to figure out this accessibility thing, and there’s a lot of laws and lawsuits and regulations and all sorts of things that make even the best of us nervous. So I think that that’s where that comes from quite a bit. Now let’s see if we both are thinking about the same example that didn’t come up in the

Justin Stockton (32:34)
Feel like you were just setting it up.

Mark Miller (32:37)
I probably was just yeah, I I kinda was. But you go you you say it and let’s see if it was and I’ll I’ll say this,

Justin Stockton (32:42)
So unfortunately it doesn’t

Mark Miller (32:44)
it somewhat relates back to the first article. I’ll just throw that out there so if what you come up with I can tie it back, then we’ll the audience will know that we’re both thinking of the same thing. That’s it’s envelope.

Justin Stockton (32:54)
So unfortunately it does not fit into the three

C based ones, customized, competitive, or correct that that George pulled together here. But I the one, the fourth one that I would add probably could actually be under competitive information is organizations that are risk adverse and do not want to open themselves, may potentially see having a published ACR.

being a gateway to say, here’s all the things we’ve already listed for you all the things that are inaccessible on our website. Please come to us. And so

Mark Miller (33:33)
Yeah.

Justin Stockton (33:34)
they are trying to hold it back in order to stem that flow.

Mark Miller (33:39)
Ding ding ding ding ding ding. Yep. So I’ve there’s a lot of great lawyers in this world, the folks at Safarth that we mentioned being among them. That’s why I related it back to that article. So the way I would state it is that I’ve I have found, this is my what I what I would say on the phone, but I’ve found that

Because we can’t give legal advice. We don’t give legal advice. This is not legal advice, but we have found that some lawyers prefer not to publish full-blown VPATs on public-facing websites and assets because it does list the things that you haven’t done which can be used which could potentially be fodder for lawsuit. So there’s just a legal risk associated with that. However

And George does go into this. That if a well-crafted accessibility statement, if you’re worried about the VPAT, a well-crafted accessibility statement is probably the right move, anyways, for a public website. I think VPATs can be a bit much in a lot of cases for a website. I think they’re very product appropriate. but putting together

In working with your company’s counsel and whomever else to do it, but putting together a statement that, you know, says, hey, we’ve got to focus on this. Particularly, this is how to reach us if you find something that doesn’t work. and not necessarily something that kind of shows everybody all your bumps and bruises, is that I think is the direction that those folks go in. But that’s exactly that was it. That was the one I was thinking of.

Justin Stockton (35:30)
Great minds.

Mark Miller (35:30)
You know.

Yeah, great minds. But don’t don’t take our that’s not advice, folks. Don’t don’t take anything that we say this is this really it that really does start to drift into an area where you need to talk to your legal counsel, you know, lawyer, somebody about it that that can that is qualified to unpack legal nuances. We are not qualified to do that. go ahead.

Justin Stockton (35:58)
One other thing I want to point

out about this article, which is cool. George did a great job of of breaking out the VPAT and everything, but the kind of I I feel like the hidden nugget at the end of this was that they’re working on an ed tech accessibility directory.

Mark Miller (36:14)
yes, yes.

Justin Stockton (36:15)
so similar if if you’ve done anything in like in the federal space, you know, GSA maintains a federal directory of of of all the applications and stuff, but also

you can go in there and you can look to see who’s got VPATs and that sort of stuff. But he’s setting what basically something up very similar but focused on education technologies.

Mark Miller (36:36)
Yeah.

Justin Stockton (36:36)
so he’s starting to gather VPATs for Canvas and what was the the one that I’m always getting the notifications from from my son’s school. I don’t think Noodle

Mark Miller (36:50)
Like Moodle or Blackboard or

Justin Stockton (36:52)
was in there.

just went right out of my noggin. now I want to grab my phone and see what it was. Cause Schoology, that’s what it was. so

Mark Miller (37:02)
I don’t know. Schools. I never would have come up with that.

Justin Stockton (37:07)
yeah, like a lot of those products and things are are listed in there. And so you can go and see like what information do they have so far on this particular piece of education technology.

Mark Miller (37:17)
I think that’s a great idea, particularly in in light of the the extended Title II and HHS deadlines. I’m not gonna go into what those are, but there’s plenty of information out there if you want out there. but those are coming up Q early Q two next year. Yep. And

so I know a lot of these higher ed institutions are really f as well as, you know, towns and and and state entities are really wondering about accessibility overall but their products are part of it.

And you know, they’re starting to develop, we have a lot of customers that we’re helping do this, but they’re starting to develop vendor programs, you know, programs within the school that evaluate vendors and the accessibility of their products and so forth. So it’s a great, great idea at this particular time in in t in the evolution of Title II and HHS. So good on you, George, for for putting that together. That’ll be super valuable to a

Mm-hmm.

Justin Stockton (38:27)
Yeah,

it’s that’s yeah, that’s really cool.

Mark Miller (38:30)
Shoot that o shoot that o do we have a did he put a link to that, Justin?

Justin Stockton (38:34)
There’s a link there’s a link in the article.

Mark Miller (38:35)
In the article, okay, so we’ll link you to the article and you can follow his link to the ed tech stuff.

Well we did it. Is there any other thoughts that you have before we wrap up?

No? All right. Well then we can wrap up. Thanks everybody for listening. Now that you we have broken down accessibility for you, we hope you go forth and keep it accessible.