The ENABLE Model

A field guide for making accessibility happen -- and for understanding what happens when it doesn't.

By Lawrence Weru S.M. (Harvard)

Presented during the keynote address for the Institute for Human Development's 26th Annual "Evidence for Success" Disability conference in Arizona, 2025.

When accessibility breaks, someone pays for it. It's not the company or the developer, but the person who needed it most.

It's a student relying on captions to keep up in class. It's a worker using a keyboard to meet a deadline. It's a customer with a stutter calling the bank to unlock their account.

These aren't edge cases; they are everyday needs of everyday people. When designers, developers, and decision-makers neglect accessibility, disabled people are left to carry the cost.

The ENABLE Model is the first field guide for recognizing that pattern -- and for doing something about it. It maps the gap between the care that designers, developers, and decision-makers should deliver -- and the labor disabled people are forced to shoulder when it's not.

It diagnoses the systemic, cultural, and organizational ailments that lead to inaccessibility.

It's a blueprint for action:

– For builders designing, coding, deploying
– For caretakers supporting access day-to-day
– For activists pushing institutions to change
– For educators shaping future norms
– For researchers documenting what's broken
– For leaders setting policy and priorities
– For teammates who don't want anyone left behind
– For anyone who believes accessibility is not a nice-to-have, but a necessary form of care

The two halves of accessibility​

ENABLE stands for:

Early Neglect Allows Barriers Limiting Equity
-- and --
End-users Navigate Asymmetric Barriers, Laboring Excessively

It maps the two halves of accessibility:

• Pre-launch interventions: The acts of care that prevent inaccessibility before something ships.
• Post-launch compensations: The acts of survival people are burdened with when accessibility is an afterthought.

When care fails upstream -- with the builders -- the burden grows and lands downstream -- on the end-users. ENABLE shows both sides of this equation and what to do about it.

The pre-launch interventions show how accessibility can be built in early, when fixes are smaller, cheaper, and kinder -- before they harden into barriers. This doesn't just shift the burden -- it shrinks it.

The post-launch compensations reveal what happens when accessibility is delayed -- how the burden multiplies and falls hardest on those already navigating the margins.

The Pre-launch Interventions​

These are the moments where builders can intervene to prevent barriers from ever forming:

1. Requirement setting -- Set requirements that include accessibility
2. Content creation -- Ensure materials are available in accessible formats
3. Design -- Create interfaces that are inclusive by design
4. Development -- Use semantic code and a11y developmen patterns
5. QA Testing -- Test for accessibility with disabled users
6. Issue Triage & Prioritization -- Treat accessibility issies like top priority blockers, not nice-to-haves
7. Iteration -- Update to address accessibility shortcomings, not just to add features
8. Stopgaps -- Implement short-term adjustments during pre-launch iteration to temporarily reduce harm. Stopgaps are inadequate, but they can prevent full exclusion while complete interventions are developed.

Each of these represents a point of care. When they're neglected, the burden shifts.

The Post-launch Compensations​

When accessibility is missing at launch, users are forced to compensate in an attempt to gain access. These compensations are often invisible, exhausting, and unequal. ENABLE outlines the most common forms:

• Assistive Technologies:
  Relying on screen readers, switch controls, voice control, screen magnifiers, etc. These tools are powerful, but they can't fix every broken interface -- and they place the burden on the user to adapt. (e.g. Navigating a poorly structured website using only a screen reader.)

• Third-party Tools:
  Overlays, browser extensions, scripts -- often community-built, sometimes flawed -- all aimed at making broken things usable. These are often fragile, inconsistent, or privacy-invasive.

• System Settings:
  Adjusting font size, color contrast, motion sensitivity, or input modes at the device level to override inaccessible defaults. Requires technical knowledge and doesn't always help.

• User Workarounds:
  Inventing new workflows, relying on memory or repetition, editing page source, scripting hacks, switching devices. These are invisible labor -- cleverness born from exclusion, which shouldn't be necessary.

• Human Help:
  Asking friends, colleagues, family, aides, interpreter, or strangers to step in -- even when it risks privacy or dignity. Reduces autonomy and requires social capital.

• Feedback & Bug Reports:
  Reporting inaccessible experiences through support channels or forms. Energy-intensive and often ignored or deprioritized. Labor is unpaid.

• Legal Action:
  Filing formal complaints under ADA, Section 508, or human rights laws. Time-consuming, high barrier, and often retraumatizing.

• Protest & Public Pressure:
  Calling out inaccessibility publicly (e.g., social media, campaigns, journalism). Often the only remaining lever when all others fail.

• Switching to Alternatives:
  Leaving one app, service, or institution for another. Only possible when viable alternatives exist -- and switching carries costs.

Each one signals a systemic failure upstream.

How to Use This Site​

→ How to wield the ENABLE model

This site is a living field guide. Use it to:

• Learn the pre-launch interventions that prevent access failures
• Recognize the post-launch compensations that signal systemic neglect
• Explore real-world manifestations and examples
• Find the entry point for your role

Why ENABLE?​

Accessibility needs more than checklists. It needs language for care, clarity about burden, and a framework for when and where action must take place.

ENABLE offers:

• A vocabulary for care and neglect
• A map of roles across disciplines and systems
• A structure that includes tech, policy, education,and more
• A compass for anyone who wants to build a more equitable world

ENABLE doesn't belong to one field. It is shaped by insights from:

• Global Health
• Social Medicine
• Disability Law and Policy
• Anthropology
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Design Justice
• Human Computer Interaction
• Information Design
• Computer Science
• Behavioral Science
• Comparative Media Studies
• Critical Disability Theory
• Public Interest Technology
• Science and Technology Studies
• Change Management
• Human Factors
• Organizational Psychology
• Systems Thinking
• Journalism
• Narrative Medicine
• History
• Economics
• Ethics
• Public Health
• Sustainable Business Strategy
• and lived experience.

It's for business owners. It's for philanthropists. It's for policymakers. It's for researchers. It's for activists. It's for investors. It's for creators. It's for you.

Why a Field Guide?​

Accessibility barriers aren't theoretical. They're the everyday reality of billions of people.

They deserve more than empathy -- they deserve action.

ENABLE isn't just for understanding where accessibility breaks. It's for fixing it through systemic interventions and compensations that remember disabled people are users, testers, researchers, students, teachers, teammates, developers, designers, caregivers, educators, leaders, voters, activists, organizers, policymakers, funders, journalists, content creators, lawyers, engineers, artists, executives, healthcare workers, decision-makers, and more -- not edge cases.

Start Here:​

• How to wield the ENABLE model →
• Pre-launch Interventions →
• Post-launch Compensations →
• Media, Storytelling, and Advocacy →

Care doesn't scale by accident. ENABLE helps you make sure it does.

It takes acquired minds
To taste this wine
Can't down it with your eyes
So we don't need the headlines
No, we don't want your headlines,
We just want --
We want the airwaves back
-- Paramore

Edited by Lawrence Weru, alum of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.