Perfect is the Enemy of Accessible

After a job switch in 2024, I was reacquainted with some perfectionist tendencies that plagued the earliest years of my career. I left a job where I mainly trained people in basic accessibility concepts, landing in two federal agency teams as the sole accessibility expert, responsible for building the backlog of accessibility issues and training teammates to make accessible data dashboards in Power BI. Going from speaking generally about accessibility for so long to having to comply with Section 508 brought up the same issues I had when first learning how to test websites for accessibility using WCAG – how was I supposed to meet this seemingly impossible standard? Add this to the knowledge that the agencies I work with could get sued if I fail. This is the perfect storm for perfectionism.

In this session, we’ll journey through perfectionism and its negative impact on accessibility work. I’ll show examples from my own career that illustrate the effects of perfectionism, such as when I first gave a training on PDF accessibility and looked up to a room full of blank stares. I inadvertently overwhelmed these newcomers with perfectionist expectations and unfortunately scared them into inaction. Together, we’ll learn to recognize when perfection is causing friction in our work, to shift away from the need to be perfect, and to create sustainable, imperfect practices.