In this post, Susi shares her thoughts on overcoming imposter syndrome and why learning practitioners must overcome it to move accessibility beyond specialist expertise and become part of everyday learning design.
A few years ago, I was privileged to take part in an AbilityNet TechShare Pro panel discussion on imposter syndrome. One of my fellow panellists was Jonnie Peacock, someone I had looked up to for years.
Jonnie had his right leg amputated below the knee after contracting meningitis when he was five. He went on to become a two-time Paralympic 100m champion, winning gold at London 2012 and successfully defending his title at Rio 2016.
So sitting next to him and hearing him talk openly about his own experience of imposter syndrome made a big impression on me. Here was someone who had reached the very highest level of his sport and achieved things most of us could only dream of, yet achievement had not made him immune from questioning himself. The AbilityNet TechShare Pro discussion on living with imposter syndrome brought together people from very different backgrounds to talk about exactly that experience.
It also made me think about accessibility, because there are so many reasons why learning practitioners can feel uncertain about whether we know enough to get involved.
Accessibility gives us plenty to feel insecure about
Accessibility can feel like a particularly easy place for imposter syndrome to take hold.
The standards are technical. There is a huge amount to learn. Authoring tools behave differently, assistive technologies work in different ways and the range of disabilities and access needs we need to consider is enormous. Even when we understand a requirement, we can still find ourselves wondering whether we have interpreted it correctly or whether the solution we have chosen will actually work for real people.
Then there are the questions that go beyond technical accessibility. Are we using the right language? Have we represented disability appropriately? Have we understood somebody’s access need properly? What if someone with lived experience tells us that something we thought was accessible does not work for them?
For some people, including me, there can be uncertainty around our own lived experience too.
- Do I have a disability?
- Am I neurodivergent enough to talk about this?
- Does my experience count?
I wasn’t diagnosed with dyslexia until later in life, and there were many years when I didn’t understand why I found some things so much more difficult than other people seemed to. Even after diagnosis, having lived experience does not suddenly give you expertise in everyone else’s disability or access needs.
There are countless opportunities to feel that somebody else knows more than you do.
And the truth is, somebody probably does.
We cannot all be accessibility experts
That is something I think learning practitioners need to become much more comfortable with.
None of us can be an expert in every disability, every assistive technology, every authoring tool and every accessibility standard. Even people who have spent years specialising in accessibility have areas where they need to research, test, ask questions or involve somebody with different expertise or lived experience.
At eLaHub, our own knowledge has developed enormously through our training, consultancy and auditing work. But some of our most valuable learning has come from discovering something we did not know, being challenged by somebody else’s experience or recognising that something we had previously done could be improved.
The problem begins when “I don’t know everything” becomes “I don’t know enough to do anything.”
That is when imposter syndrome can become a barrier to accessibility itself.
When uncertainty becomes the perfection trap
I think this can happen very easily.
You decide you want to make your learning more accessible. You start learning about WCAG and realise how much there is to understand. Then you learn about screen readers, keyboard navigation, captions, cognitive accessibility, colour contrast, audio description and accessible interactions.
The more you learn, the more you become aware of what you don’t know.
So you research more. You check everything repeatedly. You worry about saying the wrong thing or making a mistake. You may become reluctant to share what you know because somebody with more expertise might correct you.
Eventually, there is a danger that accessibility becomes exhausting.
Research into the imposter phenomenon has found associations with burnout and lower job satisfaction, although much of the published research has focused on professions such as healthcare rather than Learning and Development specifically.
But there is another consequence that I think is particularly important for accessibility.
We stop taking action.
Doing nothing can begin to feel safer than doing something and discovering that we haven’t got it completely right.
Progress over perfection
This is why progress over perfection has become such an important principle in our work at eLaHub.
It doesn’t mean lowering accessibility standards. It doesn’t mean knowingly leaving barriers in place because achieving full accessibility feels difficult. And it certainly doesn’t mean that technical requirements such as WCAG are optional.
It means accepting that accessibility capability develops over time. We learn something, apply it, test it, discover where it could be better and improve what we do next.
We explore this much more fully in our Insights post Progress over perfection [Add link].
There are examples of this throughout our own eLaHub journey. Our Access Needs Mapping activity which we discuss in our post Digital access needs – challenging assumptions originally focused on vision, hearing, motor and cognitive access needs. It was only when somebody challenged us in a session that we recognised we had overlooked speech access needs.
We could have seen that as evidence that we weren’t qualified to teach accessibility.
Instead, we changed the activity.
That is progress over perfection in practice.
Why this affects whether accessibility becomes mainstream
For me, this goes much further than how individual learning practitioners feel about themselves.
If accessibility is always left to the person who feels sufficiently expert to take responsibility for it, accessibility will remain specialist. And if it remains specialist, it will never become part of mainstream Learning and Development.
Accessibility will never become the default if learning practitioners are waiting to become accessibility experts before they start.
We absolutely need specialists. We need technical accessibility expertise, disabled people, lived-experience testing and people who understand how different assistive technologies work.
But we also need thousands of learning practitioners who feel able to make the everyday accessibility decisions that sit within their own work.
Adding meaningful alternative text. Checking captions. Using headings properly. Choosing sufficient colour contrast. Questioning whether an interaction can be operated without a mouse. Providing a transcript. Writing instructions that do not assume everybody interacts with content in the same way.
None of those actions requires us to know everything about accessibility.
They require us to know enough to make a better decision than we would have made before.
Knowing when to ask for help is part of accessibility capability
There is another side to this. Overcoming imposter syndrome does not mean pretending we know things we don’t.
Knowing when to stop and ask somebody with more expertise is an important accessibility skill in itself.
In our Designing Accessible Learning Content Programme, we are not trying to turn every learning practitioner into a technical accessibility specialist. The aim is to build enough knowledge, confidence and practical capability for people to make accessibility part of their everyday design decisions, recognise common barriers and know when specialist advice or testing is needed.
Our Accessible and inclusive eLearning – eLaHub ultimate guide serves a similar purpose. It gives practitioners a way to build their understanding of accessibility across the learning design and development process without expecting anyone to memorise every standard or solve every accessibility problem independently.
Accessibility capability includes knowing what you can do yourself and recognising when somebody else’s knowledge needs to come into the process.
Getting more comfortable with not knowing everything
For me, overcoming accessibility imposter syndrome therefore isn’t about reaching a point where we suddenly feel completely confident.
I am not sure that point exists.
It is about becoming more comfortable with four things:
- Learn enough to take the next step. You do not need to understand every aspect of WCAG before you can improve the learning you are creating today.
- Use other people’s expertise. Accessibility specialists, disabled people and people with lived experience can help us understand barriers we may never experience ourselves.
- Expect to be corrected sometimes. Being told that something could be more accessible does not invalidate everything you already know. It gives you something new to apply.
- Share what you are learning. The more learning practitioners talk openly about accessibility, including the things they are still learning, the less it feels like a subject only specialists have permission to discuss.
That last point is especially important. Accessibility becomes mainstream when it becomes part of normal conversations about learning design, rather than something we hand over to somebody else because we don’t feel qualified to contribute.
What Jonnie Peacock taught me about imposter syndrome
This brings me back to Jonnie Peacock.
I had watched him win Paralympic gold, followed his career and seen someone operating at a level of sporting achievement that was far beyond anything I could imagine myself accomplishing. His record includes Paralympic, world and European sprint titles.
Yet sitting alongside him for a discussion about imposter syndrome was a reminder that expertise and achievement do not necessarily remove self-doubt.
Perhaps that shouldn’t be the goal anyway.
We do not need to reach a magical point where we never question ourselves again. We need to stop those questions preventing us from contributing, learning and taking action.
That lesson feels particularly relevant to accessibility because there will always be more to learn.
Accessibility needs people who are willing to keep learning
If we want accessible learning to become the default, accessibility cannot remain the responsibility of a small number of people who feel confident enough to call themselves experts.
We need specialists and lived experience to guide, challenge and test what we do. But we also need learning practitioners across the industry who are willing to learn, ask questions, make accessibility decisions, acknowledge mistakes and keep improving.
There will always be something we do not know. There will be times when somebody points out a barrier we hadn’t recognised or when a solution we thought would work needs to change.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have started.
Progress over perfection isn’t lowering the bar for accessibility. It’s how we keep moving towards accessibility as the default.
And if a two-time Paralympic champion can still experience imposter syndrome, perhaps the rest of us can give ourselves permission to feel uncertain sometimes too.
We just can’t let that uncertainty stop us moving forward.
About this article
Written by: Susi Miller and the eLaHub team
Published: August 2026
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Links and resources
- AbilityNet TechShare Pro 2025 – Living with imposter syndrome
- International Paralympic Committee – Jonnie Peacock
- Research review – Prevalence, Predictors, and Treatment of Impostor Syndrome
- Progress over perfection – eLaHub Insights [Add link]
- Accessible and inclusive eLearning – eLaHub ultimate guide
- Designing Accessible Learning Content Programme
