How to Renew Your CPACC with Ease
6/29/26
Not Tupac, CPACC
After getting my CPACC (Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies) from the IAAP (International Association of Accessibility Professionals), I remember feeling some apprehension at the thought of maintaining it through CAEC (Continuing Accessibility Education Credits). Most of that stemmed from uncertainty surrounding the renewal process. Namely, what did documenting CAEC look like?
After using the newly launched IAAP Certification Portal, I'm happy to say that logging my CAEC was fairly simple. Read on if you'd like to learn from my experience and get recommendations for renewing your own IAAP certifications.
First thing's first
You'll want to access the IAAP Certification Portal. After signing in, navigate to My Certificates and CAECs to review the amount of CAEC your certificate requires and any approved CAEC submissions.
A CPACC needs 45 hours over a three year period for renewal. The two sources of my CAEC are:
- Deque University (8.25 hours of professional growth through self-paced courses)
- axe-con (42 hours of professional growth over the past three years)
axe-con is easily the biggest source of my CAEC. Yearly, it averages 14 CAEC gained from hourlong virtual presentations over a 2 or 3 day period. The presentations are recorded and freely available for anyone to watch.
It's pretty evident I could nearly renew my CPACC just by going to axe-con every year. That said, how did I go about logging those hours? Let's revisit the IAAP Certification Portal to find out.
Submitting education credits
Select your certificate on the page, then scroll to the button that says Begin Education Credit Submission and select it. Before proceeding, you'll be asked to check a checkbox to verify that your name and employer are correct. For both Deque University and axe-con, I chose Professional Development for the educational credit type to submit.
Afterward, you'll be taken to the Professional Development Education Credits form where you'll do the bulk of the documenting work. I chose Conference and Course Certificate as the formats of professional development for axe-con and Deque University respectively. Filling in the program name, program company and attendance date fields comes next.
When you get to a field prompting you to list the webinars you watched or sessions you attended, here's where we'll need to do a bit of writing. I had to copy the session names from each axe-con presentation and specify that they were an hour long, line by line. For Deque University, I listed each course name similarly.
In the subsequent inputs, I linked to axe-con and Deque University for the program URL, tallied my total number of hours and offered a small overview of the professional development I submitted. For axe-con, this was: axe-con hosts numerous accessibility professionals that share knowledge on accessible web development and accessibility best practices at different levels of organizations.
Once all the fields are filled in, select "Next" to go to the next page. Here you'll be asked for file uploads as evidence of your training. For this, I took screenshots of my axe-con registration emails and imported the certificates of my Deque University courses.
The last page prompts you to review your submission. If everything is good, you can select "Done." And that's it. Within a few weeks or so, you'll receive a notification on the status of your submission.
Easy peasy, lemon squeezy
I couldn't find any clear instructions on doing this online, so here's hoping this helps someone who had questions about it. Keep on stacking those a11y (accessibility) certificates!