EDUCAUSE

Higher education IT professionals use EDUCAUSE's frameworks, research, and community forums to set institutional digital accessibility requirements before technology ships to students, faculty, and staff.

ENABLE Model location

• Builder-side Interventions → Set Requirements that Include Accessibility
• Builder-side Interventions → Test for Accessibility
• Builder-side Interventions → Create Accessible Content

What it is

EDUCAUSE formed in 1998 through the merger of CAUSE and Educom and now connects more than 100,000 higher education IT professionals at more than 2,300 colleges, universities, and educational organizations.¹ It publishes research through the EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR), produces the annual EDUCAUSE Review, hosts the largest annual higher education IT conference in the United States, and runs member-driven community groups including a dedicated IT Accessibility Community Group.²

University IT leaders, instructional designers, procurement officers, and accessibility coordinators treat EDUCAUSE as the authoritative professional community for guidance on how to set accessibility requirements before acquiring or deploying digital tools. IT professionals consult EDUCAUSE's published frameworks to require WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) compliance in vendor contracts, evaluate technology through the Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit (HECVAT), a standardized procurement questionnaire developed with EDUCAUSE, Internet2, and REN-ISAC that now includes accessibility as a formal evaluation dimension,³ and use EDUCAUSE-hosted training and community resources to build institutional accessibility programs.

EDUCAUSE aggregates demand from thousands of institutions and translates legal obligations into operational practice for the professionals who actually procure and deploy campus technology, a function no prior accessibility actor in higher education performed at scale. Kyle Shachmut, Director of Digital Accessibility at Harvard University, co-leads the IT Accessibility Community Group, which meets monthly and convenes at the annual conference to share compliance strategies, workforce development models, and vendor accountability approaches.⁴

Why it matters

When Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, the word "internet" did not appear in the statute.⁵ The ADA's architects addressed physical spaces, employment, and telecommunications relay services but not web browsers or learning management systems, because digital technology had not yet organized the way most Americans worked, studied, or accessed public institutions. The Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights and the Department of Justice spent the following two decades issuing guidance by enforcement letter rather than regulation: a 2010 joint "Dear Colleague" letter to university presidents addressed Amazon Kindle pilots whose text-to-speech menus blind students could not operate⁶; a 2011 FAQ followed; a 2014 compliance review letter went to the University of Cincinnati. EDUCAUSE entered the accessibility conversation at roughly the same moment as Section 508's 1998 amendment to the Rehabilitation Act, which required federal agencies and their contractors to provide accessible electronic and information technology. Because universities almost universally receive federal funding, they fell under Section 508's reach even though the statute aimed at the federal sector. EDUCAUSE began producing guidance on Section 508 as it applied to higher education. Its 2007 EDUCAUSE Review article on accessibility of instructional websites documented a student-led audit at the University of Texas at Austin that found widespread failures and called for developer training, marking EDUCAUSE's first substantive accessibility coverage in the public record.⁷ Higher education built its digital infrastructure during a period in which no specific legal standard compelled accessible technology, no federal regulator had promulgated clear rules, and professional IT associations had not yet developed the institutional apparatus to transmit accessibility as an operational norm. EDUCAUSE built that apparatus.

EDUCAUSE's own 2023 QuickPoll of 736 institutions found that 82 percent had a digital accessibility policy in place and 76 percent had an official enhancement plan, yet 68 percent had already faced a lawsuit, threat of legal action, or government investigation related to technology accessibility: adopting a policy and achieving compliance proved to be different institutional acts.⁸ The same survey found that nearly half of U.S. universities had only one or two staff members working on technology accessibility, a staffing structure that cannot scale across the thousands of course materials, vendor platforms, procurement contracts, and institutional web properties a modern university deploys each semester. EDUCAUSE's community model responds to this structural gap by distributing expertise horizontally: an accessibility coordinator at a small liberal arts college in rural Ohio draws on the same ECAR research, the same HECVAT toolkit, and the same monthly community call as the team at Harvard. But distributed guidance cannot substitute for institutional investment. When EDUCAUSE data show that accessibility training is available at 70 to 72 percent of institutions but is optional at most of them,⁹ the community model reveals its structural ceiling. Disabled students and faculty carry the cost of that gap directly: downloading a PDF that a screen reader cannot parse, opening a video with no captions, navigating a registration portal that locks out keyboard-only users.¹⁰ Each of those encounters forces disabled students to endure inaccessibility, the predictable outcome of accessibility training that most institutions make optional and teams staffed at one or two people.

EdTech vendors sell into a market in which universities rarely abandon a procurement deal because of accessibility failures, concentrating the remediation cost after deployment not on the vendor but on the institution and, most directly, on the students and faculty who cannot wait for a patch. Kyle Shachmut stated at the 2025 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference that institutions "will literally be unable to comply with those regulatory requirements without support and buy-in from the broader vendor community," acknowledging that the compliance burden spreads across a supply chain that no single institutional actor controls.¹¹ The DOJ's April 2024 final rule under Title II of the ADA, requiring WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance by April 2026 for public entities serving populations above 50,000, created the first hard regulatory deadline that could shift that calculus.¹² Ohio State University Libraries received an initial estimate of $20 million to remediate its digital content, but AI-assisted tools subsequently reduced that figure substantially.¹³ EDUCAUSE's HECVAT, now in its fourth version with 321 questions across seven sections including a formal accessibility domain, gives procurement officers a documented mechanism to push vendor accountability upstream before a contract is signed, shifting requirement-setting from a post-deployment scramble to a pre-deployment condition.¹⁴ The adaptation tax that disabled students and faculty carry when requirement-setting fails is measured in hours: Harold Rogers, a blind master's student, described spending his weekends "scrambling to see what is broken and how they can navigate through it," time extracted from studying and redirected to compensating for the inaccessible technology his institution had deployed.¹⁵

Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch's "Crip Technoscience Manifesto" (2019) names the organizing premise that EDUCAUSE most directly challenges and most persistently reproduces.¹⁶ They argue that mainstream accessibility practice, including the compliance-centered frameworks that dominate higher education IT, treats disability as a problem to be accommodated after design rather than as a legitimate mode of being that should shape design from the start. Hamraie's 2017 book, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (University of Minnesota Press), traces how the Universal Design movement, the intellectual tradition that informs much of EDUCAUSE's "universal design for learning" framing, historically neutralized disability politics by converting it into a design principle available to all bodies, rather than a political demand by disabled people for control over the built environment.¹⁷ Mia Mingus distinguishes between "access" as bare compliance and "liberatory access," her term for access oriented toward connection, justice, community, and love.¹⁸ When disabled students assert rights through federal lawsuits because their institutions' policies failed to produce accessible technology, they document exactly the gap Mingus names. EDUCAUSE's community model translates legal obligations into professional practice. Hamraie and Fritsch argue that organizing accessibility around compliance preserves the power arrangement in which disabled students and faculty depend on institutions to accommodate them. They call instead for institutions that build environments presupposing disabled people's presence from the start.

Harold Rogers and Miranda Lacy, both blind master's students, lost entire weekends compensating for course technology their universities had deployed without testing for screen reader compatibility.¹⁵ Sighted students received and read that semester's documents directly, but Rogers and Lacy had to ask for human help navigating them, wait for alternative formats, or work around through their own compensatory labor while their coursework accumulated. EDUCAUSE's 2023 ECAR research found that students with mobility impairments reported only 35 percent satisfaction with institutional technology support, compared to substantially higher rates for students generally, and that students with physical disabilities reported poor institutional awareness of their needs at substantially higher rates than students with learning disabilities.¹⁹ Students who repeatedly encounter inaccessible digital environments carry sustained attentional and cognitive load: scouting for the next barrier, calculating alternative routes, and managing the emotional labor of navigating an institution that did not build for them. Le Cunff and colleagues documented the mechanism in a 2024 PLOS One study of neurodivergent university students: inaccessible content presentation generates extraneous cognitive load that overtaxes working memory, consuming the cognitive resources students would otherwise direct toward the learning itself.²⁰ Kent's 2015 analysis in Disability Studies Quarterly documented that learning management systems were "primarily inaccessible when launched," with Blackboard achieving meaningful accessibility only a decade after initial deployment, a decade during which disabled students carried the entire weight of that design failure while their nondisabled peers moved through without friction.²¹

EDUCAUSE assembled the institutional infrastructure that no prior professional association in higher education had built to transmit accessibility obligations horizontally at scale: ECAR research, the HECVAT procurement toolkit, an annual conference, and a monthly community call that connects small-college accessibility coordinators to the same frameworks used at Harvard. The April 2024 DOJ final rule supplied the external forcing function that EDUCAUSE's voluntary guidance model could not produce on its own. Vendor supply chains, staffing levels, faculty training participation rates, and procurement decisions all fall outside EDUCAUSE's authority and all determine whether accessibility obligations reach students in a given semester. Binghamton University's two-person compliance team conducted 30 trainings, audited 250-plus websites, and scanned 60,000-plus files in preparation for the deadline, showing what institutional commitment looks like at one end of the staffing spectrum.²² EDUCAUSE cannot answer what happens to the institutions where that commitment does not materialize before the deadline, and what disabled students there carry in the meantime.

Real-world examples

In the news

These blind students say their college blocked their education. A new rule could help (April 2026)
-- Jonaki Mehta, NPR / NSPR

• Harold Rogers and Miranda Lacy, both blind master's students in social work, described spending weekends compensating for inaccessible course technology at their universities. Rogers said: "It's been like going down a ski slope without any assistance." Both joined the National Federation of the Blind in a federal lawsuit. The piece was published on the April 24, 2026 requirement-setting compliance deadline for public universities under the DOJ's Title II final rule. Their experience documents the direct cost endured by disabled students when requirement-setting and qa-testing fail upstream.

In the news

Colleges Must Revise Millions of Web Pages. It Will Be 'Painful.' (December 2024)
-- Taylor Swaak, The Chronicle of Higher Education

• Reports that the DOJ's Title II rule would require institutions to remediate millions of web pages, PDFs, videos, and course materials across LMS platforms, student portals, and public-facing sites. Cites EDUCAUSE data on staffing shortfalls and references WebAIM's finding that .edu homepages averaged 20 automated accessibility errors per page in 2024, despite years of EDUCAUSE guidance. The article illustrates the gap between EDUCAUSE's voluntary guidance model and the scale of iteration now required.

In the news

Higher Ed Prepares for New Era of Accessibility (January 2026)
-- Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed

• Reports that institutions are "all over the map" on compliance readiness three months before the April deadline. Features Kyle Shachmut (EDUCAUSE IT Accessibility Community Group co-lead, Harvard) stating that institutions cannot comply without vendor cooperation. Cites EDUCAUSE data that nearly 50 percent of universities have only one or two accessibility staff and that only 22 percent of instructors consider accessibility when designing course materials. Names L. Scott Lissner (ADA Coordinator, Ohio State; Chair, AHEAD Public Policy Committee) and Jamie Axelrod (Director, Disability Resources, Northern Arizona University; Past President, AHEAD).

In the news

EDUCAUSE '25: Preparing Higher Ed for New Digital Accessibility Rules (October 2025)
-- Abby Sourwine, Government Technology

• Reports from the 2025 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Nashville covering how institutions are preparing for the April 2026 Title II deadline. Describes Binghamton University's approach: two-person team conducting 30 trainings, auditing 250-plus websites, and scanning 60,000-plus files. Krista Poppe (Binghamton Digital Accessibility Compliance Coordinator): "We convey the importance of digital accessibility, that it benefits everyone, that it's university policy, and it's required by state and federal law." Shachmut's vendor-dependency framing reappears. Illustrates both institutional qa-testing at scale and the structural limits of capacity-building through professional community.

• The National Association of the Deaf filed federal lawsuits against Harvard University and MIT in February 2015, alleging that uncaptioned or poorly captioned online courses, lectures, and podcasts violated the ADA and Section 504. Harvard settled in November 2019 and MIT shortly after. Both settlements required high-quality captioning across all publicly accessible online content on all platforms, including YouTube and Vimeo, standards those institutions had not met despite years of EDUCAUSE guidance on accessible content.²³

• UC Berkeley, following a 2014 National Association of the Deaf complaint and a 2016 DOJ investigation, removed more than 20,000 videos from public view in March 2017 rather than caption them. The DOJ found the complaint substantiated. UC Berkeley entered a proposed consent decree in November 2022, nearly eight years after the original complaint. Ella Callow of UC Berkeley's accessibility office called for a future in which "everything digital must be born accessible," a recognition that reactive compliance, even under DOJ investigation, produced years of endured inaccessibility for deaf and hard-of-hearing users.²⁴

• Penn State University, following a National Federation of the Blind complaint (case #03-11-2020), entered a voluntary Resolution Agreement with the OCR that required it to audit EIT, develop an accessibility policy statement (Policy AD69), and implement a procurement rule requiring the university to purchase only EIT that provides equivalent access to users with disabilities. Penn State's policy is documented in EDUCAUSE literature as a model for other institutions, a case in which litigation pressure produced the institutional commitment that professional community guidance alone had not.²⁵

• EDUCAUSE's 2020 ECAR study of 2,000 students with disabilities found that 46 percent had registered with disability services and received accommodations, 44 percent had not registered, and 5 percent were unaware their institution had a disability services office.¹⁰ Students who did not register were not receiving accommodations, meaning the institution's accommodation model, a compensation mechanism rather than a design intervention, missed nearly half the population it was intended to serve.

What care sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Care at the requirement-setting, qa-testing, and content stages involves naming accessibility as a procurement condition and a design obligation before a product is selected or content is produced:

• "Our RFP for a new LMS requires vendors to complete the HECVAT and submit a current VPAT against WCAG 2.1 Level AA. We will not advance a vendor to contract negotiations until we have reviewed those documents and tested their platform with disabled users."
• "We run automated and manual accessibility scans on every course shell before the semester opens. Faculty who submit inaccessible materials receive a remediation request, not a retrospective accommodation request."
• "We involve blind students and screen reader users in every major platform evaluation. Their experience in the testing session is a selection criterion, not a compliance checkbox."
• "Our accessibility team reports to the CIO and participates in every significant technology procurement decision from day one."

What neglect sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Neglect at the requirement-setting, qa-testing, and content stages involves treating accessibility as a post-deployment accommodation problem rather than a pre-deployment design obligation:

• "We'll tell students who have accessibility needs to contact disability services."
• "Accessibility wasn't in the RFP, but the vendor says they're working on it."
• "We don't have the budget to test with real users before we launch. We'll fix issues as they come up."
• "Only a small percentage of our students use screen readers, so this doesn't rise to the priority level of the other features we need."
• "We've had that captioning request in the queue for six weeks. We're understaffed."
• "Our VPAT says we're compliant. We haven't had someone actually test it."

What compensation sounds like (navigator-side compensations)

Compensation describes the labor disabled students, faculty, and staff carry when requirement-setting, qa-testing, and content fail upstream:

• "I spent the whole weekend trying to figure out how to get my screen reader to work with the new portal. My classmates just logged in."
• "I emailed the professor twice about the inaccessible PDF. Neither time did I get a response in time for the assignment deadline, so I called my friend and asked her to read it to me over the phone."
• "I know I'm supposed to register with disability services to get accommodations, but the process takes six weeks and the semester is already three weeks in. I just do what I can."
• "I stopped trying to use the university's video library after the third video with no captions. I use YouTube instead."
• "I've filed four OCR complaints in three years. Each one takes months to resolve and the fixes don't always hold after the investigation closes."
• "I asked the IT help desk about the accessibility of the exam proctoring tool and they said it wasn't their department. They gave me a number for disability services. Disability services gave me a number for IT."

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All observations occur within the context of digital accessibility in United States higher education technology, including learning management systems, course materials, institutional web infrastructure, and EdTech vendor procurement.

Footnotes

1. Mission and Organization | EDUCAUSE ↩

2. Our History | EDUCAUSE ↩

3. Accessibility in Technology Acquisition with HECVAT 4 | EDUCAUSE Review (April 2025) ↩

4. IT Accessibility Community Group | EDUCAUSE ↩

5. Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 | ADA.gov ↩

6. Joint DOJ/DOE Dear Colleague Letter on Electronic Book Readers | ADA.gov ↩

7. Accessibility of Instructional Web Sites in Higher Education | EDUCAUSE Review (July 2007) ↩

8. EDUCAUSE QuickPoll Results: Risks and Opportunities in Higher Education Accessibility | EDUCAUSE Review (August 2023) ↩

9. EDUCAUSE QuickPoll Results: Risks and Opportunities in Higher Education Accessibility | EDUCAUSE Review (August 2023) ↩

10. ECAR Study of the Technology Needs of Students with Disabilities, 2020 | EDUCAUSE ↩ ↩²

11. EDUCAUSE '25: Preparing Higher Ed for New Digital Accessibility Rules | Government Technology ↩

12. Web and Mobile App Accessibility Regulations | EDUCAUSE Review (June 2024) ↩

13. Higher Ed Prepares for New Era of Accessibility | Inside Higher Ed (January 2026) ↩

14. Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit | EDUCAUSE ↩

15. These blind students say their college blocked their education. A new rule could help | NPR (April 6, 2026) ↩ ↩²

16. Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, "Crip Technoscience Manifesto," Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5, no. 1 (2019) ↩

17. Aimi Hamraie, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017) ↩

18. Mia Mingus, "Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice," Leaving Evidence (April 12, 2017) ↩

19. Accessibility in Teaching and Learning | EDUCAUSE ECAR Students and Technology Report 2023 ↩

20. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Vincent Giampietro, and Eleanor Dommett, "Neurodiversity and cognitive load in online learning: A focus group study," PLOS One (April 2024) ↩

21. Mandy Kent, "Disability and eLearning: Opportunities and Barriers," Disability Studies Quarterly 35, no. 1 (2015) ↩

22. EDUCAUSE '25: Preparing Higher Ed for New Digital Accessibility Rules | Government Technology ↩

23. National Association of the Deaf v. Harvard and MIT | Disability Law United ↩

24. UC Berkeley agrees to make online content accessible | Inside Higher Ed (November 2022) ↩

25. Accessibility at Penn State | NFB Penn State Settlement ↩