Supporting Neurodiversity – five ways digital accessibility can help

For Neurodiversity Celebration Week 2025, Josh Lim (Digital Accessibility Leader) shares five ways to support neurodivergent readers by making your outputs more digitally accessible.

Neurodiversity Celebration Week 2025 is happening around the world this week (17^th -23^rd March 2025) and aims to challenge stereotypes and misconceptions about different neurodevelopmental and learning patterns. In my new role as Digital Accessibility Leader, I want to highlight five ways in which good digital accessibility practices can help support neurodiverse thinkers.

Where do neurodiversity and digital accessibility overlap?

There’s a common misconception that digital accessibility is solely about the steps to make things accessible to people with physical disabilities. Some typical examples are adding captions to videos for people who are deaf/hard of hearing, or adding alt-text to images for people who are blind. However, focusing on physical impairments can overlook the poor design can make significant cognitive barriers. For instance, large blocks of text can be challenging for anyone, but especially for people with dyslexia, ADHD, or other processing differences, as well as screen reader users.

While it’s important to understand and celebrate neurodiversity and different physical access needs, addressing individual conditions and labels can feel overwhelming when you’re creating digital resources. A universal design approach can be helpful here: the aim is to implement digitally accessible practices that benefit everyone, regardless of physical or cognitive characteristics.

Here are five examples of good digital accessibility practice, which you can use to boost the physical and neuro accessibility of your resources.

Use descriptive link text

You should avoid writing out URLs (e.g. www.site.com/home/information.html) or generic links like “download”, “find out more” which can cause unnecessary information, ambiguity and stress for screen reader users and neurodiverse people. Instead, you should:

• use unique descriptive link text that makes sense as a standalone phrase
• keep links short to avoid cognitive overload (don’t link to a whole sentence).
• see examples in Creating links in Typecase and Creating Accessible Links (Teaching Hub) for more guidance.

Write in clear English

Writing simply and clearly reduces the cognitive processing and working memory needed to read your content. You should:

• use simple and short sentences when possible.
• use paragraphs, bulleted lists and subheadings to help organise content and break up large chunks of text.
• refer to Writing for the web and Writing in clear English (Teaching Hub) to learn how to make your writing clearer.

Use headings

Headings and subheadings help users process information and assistive technology users navigate. You should:

• always use proper heading styles rather than manual formatting.
• see Structuring Accessible Content with Headings (Teaching Hub) and Creating headings in Typecase for guidance.

Use colour carefully

Colour can be a power way to communicate, but there are many pitfalls with colour perception: a simple example is red-green colour blindness. From a neurodiversity perspective, you should aim to use a simple, accessible colour palette with a few choice colours to avoid cognitive overload and distraction. Read more guidance on Making Colour and Contrast Accessible (Teaching Hub).

Think about different formats

Dual coding uses different ways for users to perceive and engage with content, including text, images, video, and audio. For neurodiversity, these different formats can be useful for helping people engage with your ideas: for example, an image/diagram to support the text. When using an alternative method (e.g. video), you must make sure you’re excluding anyone else (e.g. include a transcript too) and follow the general accessibility best practices.

Next steps

You might already be incorporating some of these practices as part of your general design and communication approach and these five ideas are just the beginning of where neurodiversity and digital accessibility intersect. Inclusive practices benefit everyone but are especially impactful for individuals who might otherwise be disadvantaged if overlooked.

To learn more about digital accessibility, explore the University’s Digital accessibility guidance or Digital Accessibility for teaching (Teaching Hub).