Published: Friday 4 April 2025

Documents for neurodiversity

I've been thinking about writing this series for a while now. I've noticed that more people are now aware of things like alt text, heading structures and meaningful link text to enable screen reader users to access content. In general, awareness of colour contrast has also improved. What I see less evidence of, is understanding of neurodiversity and how we can improve the user experience for people with cognitive impairments or who are neurodivergent. So I'm writing this series to address some of the issues that I think are really important to understand.

Young woman reading a document and looking confused

Why another series?

I'll be really honest, I always produce these series in sets of 5 because I need to collect Continuing Accessibility Education Credits (CAECs(cakes)) to keep my Advanced Document Specialist (ADS) certification valid. I don't know why they decided that 5 was the magic number, but if I write a series of 5 posts, I get 5 CAECs. If I write a series of 3 or 4 posts, I can't claim 3 or 4 CAECs. I have no idea why but I have to pick my battles and this one doesn't seem worth fighting. I need 2.5 CEACs before the end of August, so another series of 5 will get me over that line.

What's coming?

This is what I intend to write about:

  1. Making documents adaptable
  2. Helping users navigate
  3. Making content readable
  4. Keeping themes consistent
  5. Reducing distractions.

In coming up with this list, I was torn between following the order in WCAG versus the order in the Cognitive Accessibility Guidelines (COGA). I will be referring to both in this series, to ensure that I address as much as I can, whilst referencing existing standards.

As I write, I will try to separate out the actual guidance that non-technical people can follow, from the standards that technical people and accessibility specialists need to know and understand.

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