- Welcome to "The State of Accessibility" podcast from Vispero. I am David Sloan, chief accessibility officer. And for 2026, and this is our first podcast of the new year, taking a slightly different approach to last year and prerecording our podcast instead of going out on LinkedIn Live. This gives us a little bit more flexibility to bring in some great guests and cover important topics in the field of digital accessibility. And I guess it also helps avoid some of the LinkedIn Live gremlins that we've encountered over the years. So over this year, we'll be hearing from accessibility specialists on all sorts of topics of interests, and I'm really looking forward to some interesting conversations. So for this February podcast, we're gonna be looking at the challenges of being an accessibility professional when working in a high-stress environment where we can often meet with resistance to our efforts. And we're gonna talk about how accessibility professionals can deal with stress and avoid the chances of burnout. Something that I know is a big focus of conversation in our community. And for today's discussion, I'm joined by my Vispero coworker, Alicia Evans, senior accessibility engineer. Welcome to the podcast, Alicia. - Thank you for having me. - So just to get us started, tell us all a bit about your journey to becoming a digital accessibility professional. - Yes, thank you. So I think like a lot of people who end up in accessibility, I came here in a really roundabout way, when I graduated with my master's degree in English, my idea, the thing that I wanted to do, was I wanted to have a big adventure and work in publishing. So I moved to New York City and I got a couple of low-paying internships and part-time jobs working in literary agencies. And to support myself, I had to have two other jobs. So I worked at Shakespeare & Co., the bookstore in Manhattan. I don't think it's there anymore, but it used to be an iconic bookstore. It was pretty cool. And I worked supporting people with disabilities directly. So I worked with a young woman with multiple disabilities who was attending college. And as I was working both of these career paths, working in sort of the book industry and with people with disabilities, I started to realize that they were very different. So working in the sort of bottom rung of the publishing industry, a big part of my day-to-day job was sending out rejection letters. And if you've ever tried to write a book, I know you have, but you know that there's a lot of effort, and love, and care that goes into these books. And I felt like I was just shutting dreams down, working in publishing. Whereas supporting a woman, who didn't think she was ever going to go to college, really thrive, and flourish, and succeed in college, and getting to be a part of that was so much more rewarding and fulfilling that eventually I stopped trying to work in publishing and put my efforts 100% toward supporting people with disabilities. And over the years I worked for a few different nonprofits. The primary one I worked for, I got to support people in their jobs, in their communities, and at school, and get to just be a support in people's lives. And for the most part, that was a really wonderful job. But when I moved back to California and I got married and I, you know, entered my 30s, I decided to transition into tech. I went back to school and learned how to do web development. And from there I, pretty much as quickly as I could, made my way back into accessibility. And I've been doing that ever since. - So it's a kind of familiar pattern of discovering accessibility at some point and then realizing, yeah, this is something that is a really meaningful - Yes. - endeavor. And yeah, I mean, accessibility is really, often, you know, we certainly hear it and I think we live it as well, that it is about this level of passion and this commitment to advocating to break down barriers and help people achieve their potential and just generally make change for the better and keep that momentum going over time. So, yeah, maybe it's not surprising that with that passion and sometimes realizing that when things don't work out, just what's lost, that there is this growing focus and dealing with, you know, kind of despair, burnout, the feeling that, you know, you just can't make a difference in our community, in our profession. So, you know, what's your take on the challenges that accessibility professionals face in their work? - Yeah, I think you said it really well that when you're in any kind of job where you have to care about something or you do care about something a lot, there's a huge potential for burnout because not everybody cares the way that you care. You're faced with a lot of people who don't understand why what you're talking about is important, why it should be a priority, don't wanna spend time, or money or resources on it. And so anything like that is going to lend itself, is going to be prone to burnout. Sometimes it feels, when you're working in accessibility, like you're trying to convince someone who's, you know, building a building that it's important to put in fire escapes. You know, it's like you can see how important this is and you just have to convince the other person, this is a big deal. And sometimes you're successful at that and sometimes you're not. I know that sometimes if you're the only accessibility person at a company, or if you're working on a small team, feeling like you're in charge of the accessibility for the entire company can be a huge burden. People are looking to you if there's any kind of accessibility shortcoming, it's your job to convince the developers and the designers that this is something that they need to learn. And there's so much to learn. It's not just convincing them that it's important, but once you've convinced them it's important, you're like, "And now here's 1,000 pages of WCAG," you know? So it's a constant effort, a constant journey. And that's just the kinds of things that come up on a regular basis, on a regular day, as an accessibility professional. But this year in particular, I feel like has been even more difficult because we've had mass layoffs in the tech industry and in the government. We've had questions and concerns about where AI is leading us. Is it leading us to a more accessible internet and more accessible products, or is it going to encourage vibe coding and have just a huge massive spaghetti code out there. And then even just the way that we talk about disability and accessibility are changing at least at a federal level in the United States. So things have been a lot more stressful this year, I think, than even in previous years. And so it's a good opportunity for us to address how we can do something, you know, how we can not just fall victim to this onslaught of external things, but how we can protect ourselves and remember what brought us here in the first place; the passion, the purpose, everybody who came here, I think, who came to work in accessibility came because we care and we don't want to show up to work being dead inside, or, you know, sitting at your computer as a zombie, or just a stress monster raging at everybody. We want to be calm, healthy people who can do good work and continue prioritizing that good work. - Yeah. No, I hear you. And maybe, you know, to some extent, you know, we both work in consultancy and we have that privilege of being able to show up and support our clients who have asked us for help. And so at least there's some level of positive relationship there, and I can, you know, appreciate that compared to being that single subject matter expert that's trying to, you know, move the needle to some point. My wife Sarah Horton talks about the Accessibility Lorax, they are the one person that speaks for accessibility inclusion. And it's a really helpful analogy of when you're just that single person trying to make a difference. So, you know, we're definitely, to some extent, privileged, but at the same time, we still also can sort of come up against the sort of pushbacks and the, "Yeah, but do we have to do this?" And obviously, we're operating in a world where there are all these headwinds, whereas previously it always felt like accessibility was something that we all believed in. And so now suddenly there's kind of, you know, there are things that make us feel less certain that everyone's pointing in the same direction towards inclusion. So I know we talked before about this concept of learned helplessness, and you've talked about that a lot. Can you tell us more about what that means and what can we do about it? - Yeah, so this year, because I wanted to do something about this idea that I've seen more and more people facing burnout or just not coming to work fully present, I read a ton of books. And the first book that I read is this book, I don't know if it'll come out, is called "Burnout: "The Secret To Unlocking the Stress Cycle" by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. But one of them is a mental health professional, and the other is her twin sister. So they have good stories. But this book was recommended to me, not to me personally, but in a talk about burnout from accessibility professional Shell Little, who had a great talk about burnout. And one of the things that I found really interesting in this book was about this concept of learned helplessness. So when we're looking at the state of accessibility in the world, when we're looking at the WebAIM Million reports for the past 10 years and trying to see, are we getting any better? Are we getting any better? Or when we're talking with clients or the same developer who hasn't figured out you need to make these headings, if they look like headings and they're, you know, a section of content, then it needs to be marked up as a heading. If you're having these conversations over and over and over again, you might be learning that what you're doing isn't effective. And problematic thing about that is that if you're learning that what you're doing is not effective, then you stop trying, you stop putting in the same level of effort because you've already learned it's not doing anything anyway, like, "I'm not gonna solve this whole accessibility problem "by myself. "I'll put in the bare minimum "'cause that's what I'm being paid for and I'll step back." And of course that's a problem. You know, we have a responsibility to do as much as we can to make the world more accessible. That's what we've signed up for, even when it's hard. Okay, so the example that she gives in this book, which is really amazing, has to do with an experiment that was done with rats, with lab rats. And if you're a person who loves animals the way that I do, I apologize in advance, I'm gonna talk about this experiment because it was such a good example. So it was an experiment where you take two rats, it was probably two groups of rats, but in our case, we'll talk about two rats. And because they're two of them, we're gonna name them Thelma and Louise. 'Cause those are names of two people. So if you take Thelma and you put Thelma in a little box with a floor that's, like, electrified and will give her feet little shocks, I apologized already, I hate this, but if you give her feet little shocks, she will try to escape the box. And if you then open the door, she'll run out of the door and save herself and feel like she is, I mean, I can't tell you how the rat feels. So nevermind. She'll be safe. If you take Louise and you put her in the same box with the electrified floor, and you turn on the electrified floor and give her feet little shocks, but you don't open the door, Louise is gonna go around and around looking for that door, trying to figure out a way to escape, to protect her little feet. If you do this for enough time, she will learn that there's no escape. And if you then open the door, she won't run out. She's just gonna stand there continuing to get her feet shocked, because she's learned that there is no escape. And even though the door is open, she's not looking for it. she's already learned she's helpless, there's nothing she can do. She just has to live in this pain. And they've done similar experiments with humans. They didn't shock their feet because we treat humans differently than we treat animals in this world. But they would put them in a room with, like, a horrible, annoying sound and tell them, "You can turn off the sound." And for some people in the group, there was a switch that they could find that would turn off the sound. And for some people in the group, there was no switch. They were just trapped with this annoying sound, and there was nothing they could do. And if they then tried to put these people in a situation with another difficult problem, like solving math problems, the group that was able to find a switch and turn it off spent much longer working on these math problems than the people that couldn't solve the problem. They had just decided, without even realizing it, without telling themselves, I am helpless, they've come to learn that their efforts don't matter and that there's not a lot that they can do to solve problems. So why bother? And so you can see, or hopefully you can see that when you're dealing with these huge problems that we're facing with accessibility, where, you know, I, Alicia Evans, I'm not going to solve this all by myself, you can start to learn that you're helpless. And so then if you're faced with a new developer who hasn't learned that their headings need to be marked up as headings, you might not give it as much of your attention and your effort. You might say, "Okay, these need to be headings" and not try to teach them and not try to be involved and just do sort of the bare minimum to get the problem off of your plate. But you're not engaged, you're not active and you're not really doing as much as you would've done before you'd learned this helplessness. And the good news is that it's something that you can unlearn. You can unlearn learned helplessness, and if you feel like you're somebody who has maybe been defeated in this way, it's really important to give this your attention. So the best way to unlearn your helplessness is to have a win. Do something that you know that you can do and achieve it and reteach yourself, "No, there are things that I can do." So for example, I feel, a lot of the time, really helpless about the environment. The environment's this big problem. I'm not gonna fix it by myself, but I know that I still need to be doing a lot of things to impact my environment in a healthy way. And so when I start to feel overwhelmed, one of the things that I like to do is I put on gardening gloves, and I go out and walk them mountain trails in my neighborhood with my daughter, and we pick up trash. And in the grand scheme of the environment, it almost doesn't matter. But in terms of, you know, birds aren't gonna be choking on this garbage, people are going to enjoy walking out in their neighborhood and in the mountains, and maybe they'll value nature more. You know, these, like, little things that you can do to really remind yourself that you can achieve something, that you can have success in things and that what you do matters is really important. So for the person who, let's say, for the developer who's not learning headings, or if you have that problem all the time, maybe you write up some documentation about headings and you link it every time you see a pull request with that same problem. Maybe you don't even need to write it, maybe you can just... We have one, David Swallow wrote "Heading off confusion" for a Vispero blog a few years ago. And that one's great. It's humorous. Throw that in your Slack channel, or whatever, Teams at work, and have people read it, encourage them to read it. There are lots of things that we can do that can have success and retrain your mind to not feel like you're constantly in a state of hopelessness. - And I love that approach. It hits both sides of the work-life balance, you know, it's like finding out where the doors are in the rat experiment. - Yeah. - That there is a door there and it's always open somewhere. And I know we're gonna talk a little bit more about the self and what you can do as an individual to stay healthy and you know, stop work from affecting how you are and what you believe in, in terms of your work. But I guess, you know, thinking, it's probably a whole other podcast thinking about those little accessibility wins and maybe we'll just sort of mention one or two, but that whole accessibility, we've come a long way, we have a long, long way to go. - [Alicia] Yeah. - Paraphrasing MLK, I think. So, you know, celebrating where we've come from and the wins that we've made while also saying there's more work to do, it shows that we're being effective. It's not like we've done all the work and there's more to do. Accessibility maturity and the fact that we're on this road and we're helping others be successful, then there's loads of doors that we should be able to identify. So yeah, you've been thinking a lot and you sort of alluded to some of the things that you do to try and manage stress and keep healthy. Do you have a kind of structured approach to that? Or is it more just you found something that, like to do outside of work? There must be more to it than that. - Yeah, I mean there's so much that can go into it. It's a huge field of study, how to manage stress. But again, in this book and in other books that I've read, there's another one called "Trauma Stewardship" that I read when I was supporting people with disabilities directly that talks about how stress, it's an evolutionary response. Like, we need stress for survival. So if there's some sort of risk, if there's a predator, or if there's a rock slide, or some risk to your health and safety, your body is reacting to it. It's getting you ready to do what you need to do to survive. You know, it's providing you with adrenaline in case you need to run really fast to get away, or climb a tree, or make yourself big and yell at a bear. Don't yell at bears. I don't really know what to do if you see a bear, but your body is getting you ready to respond to a threat when you have stress. The stress response is important. The problem is, in our modern world where we're sitting in front of computers, we're not really running away from those stressors. There's nothing that's signaling to our body that we're now safe. So when you are running away from, let's use rock slide 'cause it's less scary, if you're running away from a rock slide and then you stop running, your heart's beating really fast, you're breathing heavily, but your body has signaled to your brain, we're safe now. We've escaped the risk, and now we can relax. In terms of, you know, meeting a deadline at work, or coming up with a presentation, or dealing with a coworker who doesn't like you, or whatever stress you're encountering at work, your body doesn't have a signal that the stress is over and that they should drop those levels of cortisol, and adrenaline, and whatever else. And then it compounds, you know, it's not like you're done with this stress and now you have no more stress. You've got this stressor, followed by another, followed by another, and then you just, you know, can get really tense and stay tense, you know, and you bring that into your life. Go talk to your kids while you're stressed and all those other things. So this book, again, had a lot of techniques for how to combat that. The clearest one was exercise. That was the one with the most evidence supporting it. When you are running, you're sort of simulating that getting away from the threat and your body is able to see, okay, I don't need to be stressed right now. And I wanna talk about that more. But first of all, I know that you run. So do you notice a difference - Yes. - between days when you can run and then days when you're, like, snowed in, for example, I'm snowed in right now. When you're snowed in, you can't get outside and you can't have that same experience. - Definitely, yeah. I mean, I try and run at least three times a week and I have a time blocked off in my work calendar. Don't tell anyone. You know, which I guard, and you know, I can justify it helps me stay physically and mentally healthy if I can get out and if, for whatever reason, I can't get out and whether it might be it's really icy, or raining, or my schedule's upside down because you know, there's, there's a work deadline that I can't push back then I do miss it. You know, I miss the chance to exercise and it definitely affects me in a negative way. So I try as much as possible to find time. And even if it's getting out early, earlier than than than normal, then I'll do that. And the thing about exercise is that sometimes I'll go for a run and I just don't think about anything. And it's great, I just switched off. I've got no idea. You know, I spent 45 minutes, an hour running and I was just out in the world and I didn't think about anything. In other cases, I'm coming up with ideas. - Yeah. - So it can be mentally restorative and kind of stimulating ideas again. So it's weird. And I never predict if a run's gonna be one where I'm just switching off and enjoying it or if I'm actually thinking creatively. But the crucial thing for me is kind of going out and going slowly enough that I'm always enjoying it, or at least not physically struggling 'cause that's gonna be counterproductive. I learned a long time ago that it's better to run slow and far than fast and short, if that's the only choice you have still. So for me, yeah, exercise is great and then there's this whole community layer to it, you know, like, apps like Strava, where you can build a community and connect with others. But yeah, that's, again, a whole other conversation. But for me it's a really important part of my week. - Yeah. I wish that I had that. I've never been a runner. And really, to be honest, exercise is a tall order. I have a young child. I don't have a lot of time. I don't get out very much. And we don't have any, like, classes nearby. I'm in a really rural area, so I do try. I also have this thing where if people are telling me to exercise, it's good for you. The book's saying it, everyone's saying, I'm like, "Well, I'm not going. "I don't want to," you know? - Yeah, exactly. I know that feeling, yeah. - Yeah. So, that's on my someday wishlist, but I tried some of these other things and I tried exercise, but I tried it in, like, ways where I was tricking myself. So some of the other things that she says can be probably as effective as exercise, and let me see if I can, I have a list here. Is talking to someone you love. So calling someone on the phone and talking to them, talking to someone, your family, right after work can be helpful. Or being social, going out with friends, doing something. - And I did, just yesterday, I talked to my younger son and I hadn't seen him since beginning of January. Talked to him for 40 minutes at the end of the day. And it was brilliant. - [Alicia] Yeah. - It was very uplifting. It was lovely. - Yeah, and I talked to my brother yesterday and I was like, "This is great. "Why don't I do this more?" - Yeah. - Being creative. So if you're someone who has a hobby, or if you like to draw, or if you, you know, just wanna do something creative, it triggers different parts of your brain and it relaxes you and tells you to stop being a stress monster. Giving someone a 20-second hug, feels like the longest hug in the world. But it's very, very nice. Singing or shouting, and then practicing different breathing techniques, and meditation I think would fit into that as well. And really anytime that I try meditating, if I'm like, "I have two minutes, "I'm gonna try meditating," I'm like, "That was amazing. "Why don't I do that more often?" But, again, I know it's good for me, so I don't want to, you know. So I tried an experiment in October and each month since October I tried a different one of these things. And so for October, since it was Halloween, every time I came downstairs, instead of sitting on the couch and scrolling on my phone and feeling fussy, which is what I've been doing, which is really incredible now that I'm thinking back to it, I'd come downstairs and we'd put on like the "Monster Mash" or the "Ghostbusters" theme song, some sort of like, fun Halloween music. And we'd do like a family dance party for the three minutes or whatever it was, and just dance as hard as we could and laugh. So it is combining all these things. There was a little bit of exercise, there was maybe some singing if you feel inspired to, being very social and laughing. So all of these things together. So that was my October. It was great. It was really night and day between how I was feeling in September during the workday and after the workday, and how I was feeling in October, just for that three-minute transitional time. So if there's something like that that you listeners can do, I highly recommend it. I think it's really great. - Yeah. If there's something strange in the neighborhood, it's just an accessibility professional. - Yeah. - Taking three minutes out. - Having a dance party. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah, and it seems like a lot of these activities are just getting away from, I mean, maybe with the exception of talking to somebody 'cause you could sit at your desk and chat to somebody who's hundreds of thousands of miles away, but often it's just getting up, you know? And especially remote working, home working, or just working in front of a screen, getting up and moving about somewhere else. - Yeah. - It seems so straightforward, and yet it can be unbelievably hard to do. - And so helpful. That was what I did last month. I was like, okay, I'm only walking this many steps. I'm gonna add 1,000 steps to that and really helpful. You know, I get up and I'd walk to the kitchen and walk back to my desk and it's like, I feel better already just from the little excursion within my own house. - So, one other thing, I know you've talked a lot about is passion projects, you know, what role do they play in managing stress and keeping a healthy work-life balance? - Okay, so balance is a great word that you use there. I think so far we've only talked about limiting negative emotions and negative impact, and that's not enough. You really need to have something that's soul-expanding, you know, that really lights you up and brings you alive. And that can sometimes feel like a tall order, especially if you're pretty close to burnout. And definitely don't just do these things, like, if you're actually close to burnout, talk to your manager or talk to a health professional, get support. Like, don't just try to do a dance party and hope that it's okay, like really, you know, take care of yourself. Okay, but aside from trying to limit the negative impacts and negative feelings, it's really important to also have very positive feelings and to introduce things that make you feel happy, and engaged, and like you're contributing as often as you can. At Vispero, we're pretty fortunate in that they understand that we want that and they make time for us in our schedule to have that. But we still have the same kind of trouble. I remember when I was trying to time box, so if I had something that I really wanted to do, I'd put it in my calendar for Thursday at 2:00, or something. That was my time to work on my passion project, and then Thursday at 2:00 would come, and I haven't done enough work for these other things. And next week, Thursday at 2:00. - Yep. - So the best time management technique I've found for that is just to time block it, but time block it for like Monday at 10:00, so you have enough time to come in, set your calendar, respond to emails, and then turn everything off and work on what you're going to work on for however long you have to work on it. An hour is great. If it's 10 minutes, it's 10 minutes, but setting that time aside and, like with the running, keeping it sacred, making it as untouchable as possible. And I tried that for a few weeks, and again, it was kind of incredible how well it worked because every Monday morning I was getting excited to go to work because I had my cool project I could work on. And then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, you know, on, I was thinking about what am I gonna do next Monday? And like writing notes and getting excited about it. And so even these little things really elevate your mood and make you feel more, if you're engaged for a little bit on Monday morning, you continue to be engaged throughout the week, even if it's for different things. And, you know, finding your passion projects, you know, you have to figure out what makes you happy. And I know that for me, mentorship is a big one. You can't really schedule mentorship very well, but other things along those lines. I like writing articles, I like teaching and doing trainings, and things like that, but preparing for those things, coming up with code examples, that really makes me excited. I've talked to a lot of people who don't have that kind of privilege, don't have the ability to set aside an hour. But doing something I think is really important. If you say, I had the same problems every day of the week with every project I work on, I'm gonna set aside 10 minutes each week to try to work out a new process that we can follow as a team or to try to make this code example or to, you know, code this bookmarklet that will help our team do these things more effectively, you know, so that it's really, you're bringing the best of yourself and you're engaging with these parts of yourself that you love and making things incrementally better, even if you have problems. And if you don't even have time for that, then I would say just thank people for the things that they're doing. You know, like if someone on your team did a great job or if someone's always really supportive of you, or if a client really put in the extra effort for something. I know there's a lot of science around gratitude, gratitude journaling and all these things. Gratitude journaling didn't work for me so well. But actually expressing that gratitude does a lot of things. It helps you with that actual gratitude, you know, the expression of gratitude. It helps the other feel supported and acknowledged and it helps you build relationships with other people. So something that can take you two minutes, thanking a colleague, can still add a lot of joy to your life and a lot of good things to your life. - Absolutely. Yeah. That sounds like a great way, you know, it's back to where we started with, passionate about accessibility, sometimes channeling that passion into a way that's not harmful but is really focused on doing something positive. And even if it's just for you achieving it, - Yeah. - then that can help. So yeah, and as we come to the end of this conversation, the importance of gratitude and the positive feeling of being thankful, you know, I think we wanna thank everyone who in, our communities, share their personal experiences of dealing with burnout. I mean, it's tough out there, it's challenging with all of the layoffs and the other contributing factors we talked about already. So, you know, we are very grateful to everyone who's shared their experiences and approaches to dealing them. And thank you to you, Alicia, for giving up your time to chat with me today. It's something that's really important to focus on, and we all need to continue to be kind to each other and give each other space, help each other move forward and give ourselves time to step back when we need to. So thank you for joining us. - No, thank you so much. - So now you know "The State of Accessibility". I'm David Sloan, thanking Alicia Evans and reminding you all that the state of accessibility is always changing, so please help us affect change. Thank you.