It is designed to break your heart: Cultivating a harm reduction mindset as an accessibility practitioner

Description

Working in digital accessibility requires so much. From design, to code, to theory, to practice. There’s also minding arcane, technical details, all the way up to the holistic big picture. Then factor in concerns like history, politics, law, and armchair psychology.

For many of us, it is also deeply personal work, whose responsibilities are felt far deeper than the day-to-day requirements of a regular job. The constant demand for perfection, coupled with the asymmetry of power that accessibility work compels is a recipe for harm if boundaries and protections are not set in place.

This talk will discuss this concern holistically. It will also reference the practice of harm reduction as a methodology to enable you to sustain your best efforts and not burn out.