This Neurodiversity Celebration Week I am, fittingly, delivering neurodiversity training.
As a neurodivergent person I try to design my training from a neuroaffirming perspective, and I do design it to suit me – after all I have to look at it more than anyone else does!
While I educate and inform about neurodiversity in my work, I learn about it as well. I hear the experiences of neurodivergent people and those close to them. Learning from lived experience is incredibly powerful and it’s one of the things that grounds the information in real life.
Something that has been really valuable to learn is designing for diverse perspectives – my natural style is verbose; this means I opt for the most precise term but often lack awareness of whether my audience will understand what I’m saying.
Things I consciously do:
- Use a light coloured background and sans serif font to accommodate dyslexic learners. I often choose a pale green because I also find it calming to look at
- Use illustrations to add interest – sometimes a picture helps get the message across and illustrations require less visual processing to get the meaning
- Get the language in early – I like to define the terms I use early on, or when I am using them. This addresses the immediate “what does that word mean?” question that we all have when hearing an unfamiliar word
- Allow people to have their cameras off for virtual training. I even explain why this is when I discuss accommodations – it’s a reasonable adjustment I make as standard. Do I feel weird delivering to a sea of black screens? No – I know people are engaged because they ask questions and give me good feedback
- Tie in things people have said during training. I like to feel seen if I make a contribution, so I do it for others. It also helps ground the training and the message in the experiences of the delegates’ peers
Things I consciously don’t do:
- Do icebreakers – as an autistic person I really hate being put on the spot to talk about myself when I’m a delegate, so I don’t do icebreakers. I also don’t think it’s fair for companies to pay me for time that I’m not actually imparting any information
- Use photographs – facial expressions are so open to interpretation that they can distract, or even send the wrong message (because 55% of what we communicate comes from the look of our face, not the words we say)
- Call on delegates to contribute. Again, I don’t like being put on the spot and it makes me feel uncomfortable to see others be put on the spot
Things I’m going to consciously do from now on:
- Read through my slide content and delivery notes to adjust the language to be suitable for a broader range of people
- Split content across more slides to make them less text-heavy – I think I’ve been led by the idea that having loads of slides is overwhelming, but it’s actually the amount of content that needs this rule, not how it is visually presented