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Educause

Higher education institutions and IT professionals leverage Educause's resources and community to advance technology, including accessibility, within academic environments.

ENABLE Model location​

What it is​

Educause is a non-profit association that serves as a community and resource for higher education information technology leaders and professionals. It influences institutional practices by providing guidance, research, and frameworks related to the adoption and management of technology in colleges and universities.

In the context of the ENABLE Model, Educause functions as an actor in promoting proactive measures for digital accessibility, thereby helping to prevent inaccessibility before something ships.

Why it matters​

Educause's work helps embed accessibility as a core obligation within higher education IT, rather than a discretionary add-on. By influencing Pre-launch Interventions, Educause helps institutions adopt practices where fixes are smaller, cheaper, and kinder, preventing accessibility barriers from hardening into significant burdens for disabled students, faculty, and staff. Its advocacy and frameworks can guide universities to counteract neglect and disinformation and misinformation regarding accessibility, promoting it as a necessary form of care.

How stakeholders use it​

  • University IT Leadership use Educause's guidance to establish institutional policies and procurement language that mandate WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) compliance for new digital products and services before acquisition. This bakes accessibility into contracts and IT strategy from day one, similar to how Enable Ventures includes accessibility in term sheets.
  • Instructional Designers and Faculty apply Educause-promoted best practices to produce educational content that is accessible by default, ensuring digital documents include semantic structure, images have alt text, and multimedia provides captions and transcripts before course delivery. This mirrors the work of Accessible EDU Consulting and Beacon College.
  • University Developers and Designers consult Educause's recommendations to build and design educational technologies using inclusive patterns and semantic code, ensuring compatibility with assistive technologies and accessible user experiences. This is akin to Google's Products for All guidance.
  • University Accessibility Teams leverage Educause's frameworks to conduct accessibility testing, ideally involving disabled users, and to integrate these tests into development pipelines to catch bugs before launch. This aligns with practices seen at Aspiritech and Fable.

Real-world scenario​

A university's public-facing IT strategic plan or accessibility report cites Educause's framework as the guiding principle for their digital accessibility initiatives, demonstrating a shift in procurement and development practices that results in a measurable reduction of accessibility-related support tickets for students with disabilities over multiple academic years.

📝 Disclaimer

The ENABLE Model draws on principles from anthropology and journalism to document how people intervene or compensate for accessibility breakdowns in the real world. Inclusion here does not imply endorsement. We focus on observed use -- how a tool, organization, or strategy is actually used -- rather than how it is marketed. Citations, when provided, are for verification and transparency.