How have you made your product easier for neurodivergent users?

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Check out my MoT article, “Autism-aware application design: Tips for software testers,” to explore how inclusive design can make software genuinely usable for autistic and neurodivergent people — and better for everyone.

What you’ll learn:

  • What autistic users experience when software isn’t designed with them in mind
  • How inclusive design principles improve usability for all users
  • Practical UI recommendations from research and autistic testers
  • How testers can advocate for autism-aware design in their teams
  • Simple actions to make accessibility part of everyday testing

After reading, share your thoughts:

  • What small changes have you made to make your product easier for neurodivergent users to navigate?
  • Which inclusive design ideas from the article could you apply in your current project?
  • How do you balance accessibility improvements with business or design priorities?
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Really, really good article.

To be fair we have not looked at autism specifically but have accessibility as a core design and development focus.

Previously it came under a very general ease of use and UX but this was nowhere near enough in its consideration.

Most of our testers, designers and UX have gone through some training on this front and developers now more likely to also do the training. We also do audits and testing for wcag, its fairly broad coverage recognises the diverse preferences that in theory will likely cover various levels autism which itself is very diverse.

We also have test groups with various accessibility needs so we understand the challenges better.

Would you say the above would cover a lot of autistic needs?

The interesting part for me is variations of web design, as mentioned letting the user configure the site to suit their needs or automatically streamlining to user preferences, this is still experimental.

I think AI may be able to be leveraged on this front.

I am jumping into the future a bit and not something on my current projects radar, however I like the idea of accessibility agents (business idea right there) that can re-represent a website on its own, so generic adaptation apps. For individual websites and apps this may be about making it compatible with these agents rather than building in everything per each app. We will likely need to make apps that are compatible with agent use anyway so good to start thinking about accessibility agents now.

One final thought, these are business decisions and there is a significant diverse market out there that may not be able to use your apps, maybe 20% impacted. The selling point of increasing market by 20% is often a no brainer if you want management onboard.

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Thank you so much for spending the time to the write this article. Its so powerful and reminds me that we’ve trivialised to a degree accessibility testing down to WCAG checklists, DOM analysis tools and screen readers.

I don’t have any words of wisdom to add and I’ll hold my hands up to that. On the positive side we’ve got a new project and I’ve been advocating getting people beyond engineering to play with it and take accessibility beyond the tools. We do have a neurodivergent support group in our organisation, so I can’t think of anything more positive in asking them to play a role in making our products better.

Thank you again :folded_hands:

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