Who is accountable for vendor accessibility?

A student does not know that one platform was cleared by IT, another was bought through procurement, and a third arrived through a pilot. They only know that the payment did not go through, the advising tool was hard to use, or the form would not work with their assistive technology. From their side, it is all the institution.

Why vendor accessibility slips through

• Accessibility is checked as a document at purchase time — a VPAT or a vendor claim — rather than tested against the tasks students will do.
• Pilots and departmental purchases bypass central review entirely.
• Tools change after purchase through vendor updates nobody re-tests.
• No single team owns the question once the contract is signed.

Build it into procurement

• Ask for current accessibility documentation, and ask how it was produced and when it was last updated.
• Test the core student tasks yourself, keyboard-only and with a screen reader, before signing.
• Write remediation timelines and re-testing expectations into the contract.
• Require pilots and departmental tools to go through the same review before students must use them.

Give it an owner

The most useful change is also the simplest: name who is accountable for the accessibility of each student-facing third-party tool, from evaluation through renewal. Without an owner, known issues sit in a vendor queue while students work around them — or stop trying.

Next step

Tell us which third-party tools sit in your students' critical paths — payments, advising, registration, LTI tools inside the LMS — and we'll help you test them against the tasks students actually need to complete.