Procurement of 3rd party tools

Hello,

I work in higher education and we're currently going through a rather large accessibility initiative right now. Yesterday something interesting came up and I thought this group would be a good group to consult.

We have a process of requiring information from 3rd party vendors, but do not have a set accessibility standard for which they must meet. We are often finding all or a majority of vendors are not fully ADA compliant and, up until recently, we've been okay with it. Since the vendors are meeting all of our technical and business process requirements, we don't want to give up on them if they're not ADA compliant. Currently, our process is still very much up in the air since there are a lot of variables. We do require a VPAT as part of the RFI but we don't really do much with it right now.

I'm working with legal at my institution to find and define a standard for which third party tools must meet. We are also working on communication with the vendors to discuss remediation plans. My question for the group, does anyone else have a similar process they would be willing to share? How we might define "ADA compliance" as it relates to 3rd party tools?  Should we develop our own instrument for assessing this, is there a minimum score/response on the VPAT that we should require, or ???

Any information would be helpful.

Thank you!
-Josh