For this blog post I would like to share some thoughts about a talk about accessibility and neurodiversity and add some personal observations I made spending time with my sister.
Side info: My sister (25) is neurodivergent and struggles to use digital interfaces. Because they are part of every day life she has learnt to deal with the difficulties in her own way but often requires help by my parents, me or my brother.
In October we visited the World Usability Congress (WUC) where I attended the talk by Alide von Bornhaupt about designing for neurodivergent people.
In my experience the term “accessibility” the context of digital design is a highly relevant topic in Design Conferences (as it should be). But the talks usually focus more on physical restrictions or disabilities and less on psychological accessibility. Thankfully, in recent years neurodivergence is talked about more openly and resources are more widely spread.
This is why Alide’s talk stood out to me in the agenda of WUC. She started out her talk with telling her audience why keeping neurodivergent people in mind when designing with some numbers:
- every 5th person is neurodivergent
- 300 000 inhabitants in Graz –> 61 000 people in Graz are neurodivergent
A tram ticket in Graz is 3,50 €. If buying a tram ticket is not possible / challenging for this group of people this could mean more than 213 000 € loss in revenue for the tram company.
I’m aware that Alide used this example to put the whole topic into a business perspective, especially for people that need to convince stakeholders to shine a light on neurodiverse people. Nevertheless I found this example kind of hilarious because buying tickets for public transport is something my sister struggles with a lot. Taking the train to visit me in Graz and going on the tram to my appartement has been challenging every time she visited me in the last year. But because she she has no other option than to buy the ticket, nobody is losing money.
Neurodiversity can be many different things like ADHD, autism, dyslexia. Neurodivergent people often struggle with energy because they mask certain behavioral patterns to not seem different. My sister particularly struggles with reading and comprehending patterns that seem straight forward to allistic patterns. She gets overwhelmed with the “simple” task of buying a ticket and has to seek help from her family. This makes her less independent of her own life and reliant on help from others.
Of course the ideal solution would be to have testing pool of neurodiverse people to evaluate their struggles and needs. But this can be challenging because half of neurodivergent adults are not diagnosed and neurodiversity is so individual. This is why Alide emphasises to test digital products with lots of people. Because the more people you test with, the more neurodiverse people you test with.
As mentioned in previous blog posts, my research topic (nationwide eHealth tool) needs to be something that is designed for everyone. In my thesis I really want to focus on the aspect of designing for neurodiversity. Because technology is evolving so rapidly and even allistic (neurotypical) people are struggling to keep up I really hope to meet the needs of people like my sister when designing tools to make everyday life simpler to navigate through.
No AI was used to create this blog post.
