Written by Annie Wu, Disability Program Assistant
My experiences with masking, perfectionism and learning the unwritten rules of employment changed how I think about workplace barriers. Through EmpowerAbility, I'm helping to explore how students, career services and employers can work together to create more accessible employment pathways.
For a long time, I thought being a good employee meant learning how to fit in.
I'm curious and conscientious about my work. When I'm learning something new, I want to understand it properly. When I finish a task, I can go through the details repeatedly, checking my work against my own idea of what “good enough” looks like.
That attention to detail can be a strength, but it can also take a lot of time.
Sometimes I'll spend extra hours getting something right and then spend extra time recovering from those hours. The same qualities that help me produce work I'm proud of can also make the personal cost easy to miss.
The difficult part is that the exhaustion isn't always visible.
When I'm drained, I can still appear to be doing fine. I keep showing up. I keep communicating. I keep producing. From the outside, everything can look the same while I'm running on empty.
That's what masking can look like for me.
An employer might see someone who is conscientious, curious and capable. They may not see how much energy it takes to maintain that performance. If that effort eventually becomes unsustainable, the change can seem sudden. The work that was once exceptional may no longer be sustainable.
When I didn't understand why things felt so difficult, I often looked inward first. Maybe I needed to communicate better. Maybe I needed to prepare more. Maybe I needed to work harder. If I was struggling, I assumed there was something I needed to learn or do differently.
That led me to focus on learning the rules of employment.
Learning the rules no one taught me
I had some preparation for entering the workforce. I learned how to write a résumé and got tips for interviewing. However, what about professional communication? Networking? How do you know what an employer is really looking for when they don't say it directly?
Much of this was self-taught.
I searched for information, tried different approaches and learned through experience. Sometimes the information I found didn't quite translate into real situations. The more I tried to learn the rules, the more I noticed something uncomfortable: many of them weren't written down.
I was spending a lot of energy trying to figure out what other people seemed to know intuitively.
When I was already worried about getting things wrong, it can be tempting to choose the safer option. For me, perfectionism and fear of rejection sometimes made it easier to pursue opportunities where I already knew I could succeed. Taking a chance on something new meant having to explain confidently what I could contribute and that felt much harder
At the time, I saw this mostly as something I needed to solve myself. I didn't yet have the language to ask whether the environment was part of the problem.
Looking at the environment
Working in the disability field helped me recognize barriers I had not always been able to identify. More importantly, I learned to look at behaviour in context.
One of the simplest ways I learned to think about this came from something as ordinary as a garbage bin.
If we want someone to put something in the correct bin, we can repeatedly tell them what to do. Or we can make the environment easier to understand. We can use colours, labels, shapes or different openings to show users how to correctly use the bins.
We can change the environment instead of assuming the person simply needs to try harder.
The example is simple, but the principle stayed with me: when something isn't working the way we expect, we can look at the environment before deciding that the person needs to change.
Eventually, I realized I could ask the same question about my own experiences at work.
What if some of the things I had been trying so hard to fix about myself were responses to an environment that wasn't designed with me in mind?
A workplace expectation that seems obvious to one person might be confusing to someone else. A communication style that feels effortless to one employee might take considerable energy for another. A process can look completely neutral while creating a real barrier for the person trying to navigate it.
This was one of the ways I came to understand the Social Model of Disability. The social model distinguishes between impairment and disability and emphasizes how barriers in society can disable people. Barriers can also come from the environments, systems, attitudes, communication and practices around us.
Once I started looking for barriers in the environment, I realized my experiences were not isolated.
The problem is bigger than one person
Canadian research shows that post-secondary graduates with disabilities have 20% lower odds of employment than their peers without disabilities, even after accounting for sociodemographic characteristics (Mofidi & Tompa, 2026). Graduates with disabilities are also more likely to experience part-time or temporary employment, overqualification, lower job satisfaction and lower earnings (Mofidi & Tompa, 2026).
The broader Canadian picture also shows substantial accessibility barriers. Statistics Canada (2023) reported that 72% of people with disabilities experienced at least one accessibility barrier in the previous year. Among the barriers reported, 48% were related to communication barriers and 37% involved behaviours, misconceptions or assumptions.
The barriers don't necessarily stop once someone gets hired, either. Untapped Talent (2026) reports that 68% of people with disabilities experienced an accessibility barrier during the hiring process, while 69% of employed people with disabilities experienced at least one accessibility barrier at work.
These numbers helped me see that what can feel like an individual struggle can also be part of a much larger pattern.
If barriers can be built into the employment pathway itself, then simply teaching individuals how to navigate that pathway cannot be the whole solution.
Designing the pathway differently
This is where universal design became important to me.
To me, universal design means thinking about accessibility before someone must ask for an exception. It could mean a clearer job description, more explicit interview expectations, different ways of demonstrating skills, flexible work arrangements, clearer communication or changes to duties, schedules or supervision.
The goal isn't to create a completely different workplace for every person. It's to look at the environment and ask where unnecessary barriers can be removed.
Accessibility is also not necessarily about expensive technology.
Research presented by the Canadian Council on Rehabilitation and Work examined workplace assistive-technology accommodations and reported an average one-time cost of approximately $375 for paid accessibility supports. The research also emphasizes low- and no-cost workplace modifications as part of barrier removal (Al-Azary et al., 2024).
The point isn't that every accommodation is inexpensive. It is that accessibility does not automatically require a major financial investment. Sometimes it means changing how work is structured or supported.
Of course, universal design doesn't mean everyone gets the same thing. Individual accommodations will still be important for many people.
Building with people, not just for them
If we're going to remove barriers, we need to listen to the people experiencing them.
That principle is at the centre of the EmpowerAbility Program at 91ɫ's Co-op & Career Centre. The program is being designed around the principle of “Nothing About Us, Without Us,” Its design is shaped through co-design and informed by the lived experience of people with disabilities (Cohen et al., 2026).
As part of EmpowerAbility, I’m helping build work-experience opportunities for students by connecting with employers. I also contribute to developing resources and educating employers about universal design and disability-inclusive practices, with the hope of reducing systemic barriers.
The program includes planned supports such as career transition support, meaningful work-study opportunities, mentorship, professional networking, employer capacity building and online resources for students, faculty, staff and employers (Cohen et al., 2026).
This is where my past and present connect.
I once had to teach myself many of the unwritten rules of employment. Now I'm helping build some of the structures I wish I had encountered earlier: ways to gain work experience, connections with employers, career resources and opportunities to learn from professionals who bring lived experience.
Working on EmpowerAbility has also changed how I think about responsibility.
Everyone has a role to play
I don't think students should have to carry the responsibility alone.
Students should have support to advocate for themselves, understand their strengths and communicate what they need.
Career services can provide career education, mentorship, resources, connections and opportunities to employers and other professionals
EmpowerAbility can bring students and employers together while ensuring that lived experience informs the program’s design.
Employers can also look at their own systems. They can make expectations clearer, identify unnecessary barriers, listen to disabled people, consider universal design and provide individual supports when they're needed.
This is not about expecting employers to know everything about every disability. It is about being willing to learn, listen, and change. The disability-confidence framework similarly emphasizes learning directly from people with disabilities, identifying and removing barriers, providing accessibility supports and avoiding assumptions based on labels (Untapped Talent, 2026).
No one group can do all of this alone.
- Students bring lived experience and expertise.
- The Co-op & Career Centre creates connection and provides support and opportunity.
- Employers shape the environments where work happens.
When those pieces come together, accessibility becomes more than something we add after a problem appears.
It becomes part of how we build the pathway in the first place.
The question I keep coming back to
For a long time, I thought being a successful employee meant learning how to fit myself into the workplace.
My experiences—and the work I've done since—have made me ask a different question: Was the workplace designed to let people succeed?
If the answer is no, I don't think the solution should always be to ask the person to work harder at fitting in. Sometimes we need to change the environment. We shouldn't design that change without the people who experience the barriers.
My goal isn't to teach people with disabilities how to become better at navigating barriers. It's to help create employment pathways with fewer barriers to navigate in the first place.
If students, career services and employers can build those pathways together, maybe the next person won't have to learn everything the hard way.
References
Al-Azary, N., Gallant, J., Izadi, E., Bath, R., & Sinclair, V. (2024). Simple changes with big impacts: Low- and no-cost accommodations that benefit everyone [PowerPoint]. Canadian Council on Rehabilitation and Work.
Cohen, L., Lecompte, A., & Amjad, H. (2026). Access, empowerment & opportunity: Transforming career support for students living with disabilities [PowerPoint].
Mofidi, A., & Tompa, E. (2026). Postsecondary graduates with disabilities: Transition to the labour market, employment characteristics, and student debt. VRAIE IDEA.
Statistics Canada. (2023, December 1). Canadian Survey on Disability, 2017 to 2022. Government of Canada.
Untapped Talent. (2026). Explaining disability confidence [PowerPoint]. Canadian Council on Rehabilitation and Work.