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JUSTIN MERHOFF: 
Hello everyone, my name is Justin Merhoff from Deque, and I will be monitoring Neuroinclusive Content Design monitored by Laurie Cameron-Back, before handing over to Lori L do some housekeeping stuff. First this will be hosted by Lori and today's session is being recorded and will be hosted on demand for registrants. Furthermore slides for today's session are available on the webpage. 
 
If you require live captions for today's session you may access those in the video player or on the transition-- transcription link on the session page. Lastly, we will try to save the last 10 minutes of today's session for Q&A. Please post your questions in the Q&A section of Pubble located next to the video stream. With that I will turn it over to Laurie. 
 
LAURIE CAMERON-BACK: 
Thanks Justin, hi everyone. Thanks everyone I am Laurie, on the lead content designer at Hilton, where I have a really cool theme of UX and UI designers and IT specialists, I'm based in Edinboro in the UK and I use pronouns she/her, a woman in my mid-30s, dark hair of nice pink sweater and a necklace with my name on it for those who can't see. 
 
Thanks so much for coming along today, and special thank you to any of my West coasters, anyone on the West Coast watching at 7 AM, big applause for you, don't know if there's any of you here but that's dedication if you are. 
 
So getting into our agenda for today. We have quite a simple agenda so I'm going to go through a little bit about what content design is for those of you who may not know, I'm going to talk a little bit about what neurodiversity is and then we can get into the kind of meat of the presentation which is narrowing design. Then we'll have some questions at the end. 
 
So this talk is really designed to give you some kind of practical tips and strategies the you can actually take away and hopefully implement not only in your professional life actually, but in your personal life too, so hopefully that's what this will give. 
 
So what is content design? As we will find out, content design is more than words. And here's a little joke that I've thrown in for about the 1% of people that are probably going to get this. When I was writing this I was immediately like "more than words!" And it reminded me of that Extreme song 'More Than Words'. And if anyone's a fan of the it's always Sunny in Philadelphia, here we have a picture of the gang in the bar and the =do a little harmonization, to more than words, and I asked my husband if I should put this and he said absolutely not no one's going to get it, so if we have any Sunny fans, if you are here this is for you. 
 
So moving on, here we are. We are designers too, so probably one of the biggest this conceptions about content design, and if I have any content designers here, you will all be very from you but this is the big misconception is that all we do is write words, or copy, or all we do is put words into boxes. So putting words individual designs that already exist. 
 
So this actually can be further from the truth. There is a huge amount of work that goes on behind the scenes before we start writing anything, before we put any pen to paper, before we start typing out anything. In these are some of the things we do and these are some of the key pillars of what it means to be a content designer. 
 
So we are researchers. Like some of our other colleagues across the UX discipline, we do our own research sometimes. Like again with all the disciplines across UX, of course our best practices and standards for content design, but without research we can't really consider it to be content design. So as content designers we do things like desk research, because we want to understand our audiences, we want to look at how our users use language as well. 
 
We might look at how our competitors are using language, sometimes we also run testing activities to check if our content deadline which is working for people or we might actually collaborate with our user research partners as well to create testing scenarios for our content. 
 
User needs, content designers don't usually move without having a really firm understanding of what the problem is that we are trying to solve. So to do that we look at things like user journeys, build out user journeys and user maps so that we can really begin to understand where the pane points lie for our users. To help with that we might write user stories which really help us to define what it is that our users need. 
 
Strategy is a huge part of content design, in fact you will often hear content designers being referred to synonymously as content strategists. My job role happens to be content designer, but I did a lot of strategy work, and content design and strategy are inextricably linked. We are always looking at the best way to create, publish, govern and manage our content and we are using strategies to do that. And we are also – we want to strategize the best way to use consistent language across our multiple touch points as well, so that might mean creating things like content style guides are looking at language best practices, so we're kind of constantly creating strategies and processes around that. 
 
We are also really big collaborators, so quite often act as a linchpin between the other UX disciplines, product partners, perhaps our developing partners, and also in my case, I work with a lot of brand and marketing people as well. So we really work in a silo and actually effective content design doesn't really work when we are working by ourselves. 
 
We iterate. That means after we've tested our content, actually produce something and tested it with users, we carve out dedicated time to iterate on our designs, so we will take our user feedback and then we will refine our ideas if we need to go back to an ideation or prototype stage. An iteration is a huge huge part of content design as it is across the whole of UX discipline, but it's really how we design the best experience for our users. So designing content is not just writing copy, and if there's one thing I want you to take away from this section of the presentation needs to remember that we are doing a lot more than just writing words, and we are designers too! 
 
And just to translate that quickly into maybe thinking that's all very well, but what do you actually do in your day today? We do things like creative strategies. We set goals or objectives around our content, as I said we think about our target audience, we create content management plans and processes and thinking about content lifecycle and governance of our content and quite often that will translate into a strategy document and we will have a sort of strategy document for each project we are working on generally. 
 
We also audit, so we take stock of existing content and we look at how effective that is against a set of parameters. So perhaps how well we are performing in terms of accessibility, where our content is outdated? Where things are needing to be rewritten or need to go back to subject matter experts and rewrite things. We produce UX ratings, so that is sometimes referred to as macro copy, so if you've ever scene things like really small bits of text or labeling on designs, may be linked text or menu navigation terms or error text, all the little bit of copy that you see and that is often linked to excessively, everything we've talked about is baked into our work. 
 
Information technology in a structured way, we do create content sometimes, I find further along in the content design career you are the less you tend to write stuff and the more you tend to focus on but we do right occasionally. We edit content too. 
 
We help our you ask, we're all good is storytelling we tend to generally come for that background and we have to advocate a lot for ourselves as content designers and what other people do that too and react is counted designers to so someone comes to me and says we want content design input on this, can you help us? 
 
So a in a nutshell that's what content design is about now going to move on to the neurodiversity section. So neurodiversity is a concept that recognizes and celebrates the natural variations in neurological functioning among people. It suggests that neurological differences such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia and other conditions are simply variations of the human brain rather than pathologies or disorders that need to be fixed or normalized. 
 
And actually around 15 to 20% of the US population is considered to be neurodivergent, which is quite a big chunk of people. I've listed a few neurodivergent conditions here, but please know this doesn't cover anywhere near the full range of the neurodivergent spectrum, I just use these really as it a few examples to help illustrate some of the points I will be making today. I unfortunately don't have time to go into these in great detail, so I'm just going to cover a couple of the ones that might be less known. 
 
So we have ADHD, most people have heard of that, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. So some the experiences someone with ADHD might have his trouble focusing on one thing at a time, they may be more easily distracted for instance by a busy page. They also might find it more difficult to multitask or suffer from restlessness. Anxiety, I'm sure we are all quite familiar with, there's a big wide range of anxiety, autism, so around 1% of the UK and US population has been diagnosed with autism but of course that's just people who have an actual diagnosis. 
 
This can affect a person's social skills, communication skills, their behavior, and some with autism may have sensory sensitivities, which is going to be quite important when we come to talk about things later on. They may have unique ways of looking at the world or interpreting information, which of course makes it really important that we make things clear for them when we are designing. 
 
Dyslexia, I'm sure most of you are aware of. This may affect a person's reading skills, mainly in areas such as word recognition and reading fluency, and around 10% of the UK population have dyslexia. Dyspraxia may affect movement work coordination, epilepsy and OCD are a bit more common. You may have heard of those and Tourette's as well. 
 
Interestingly, as a side note every time I see the word Tourette's I always doubt that'because I've got a think that's gotta be a sneaky possessive apostrophe popping in their when it shouldn't be, but actually it is, because the man who lent his name to Tourette's syndrome was called George Gilles de Tourette, so that is correct with the apostrophe. 
 
So some things that might be affected by the conditions I mentioned our hyperfocus, fine detail processing, concentration, memory, cognitive control mental health, sensory awareness, observational skills, verbal skills and reading skills. And again this is absolutely not an exhaustive list, these are just some of the things I'm thinking about when we are going to the presentation today. 
 
These are all things that can actually really contribute to a user experience while using a website or product and things we need to be aware of when we are designed to make sure we are designing for everyone. If we are not designing for these things, then we really aren't designing content for everyone, and we aren't inclusive. 
 
As we've heard, 15 to 20% of the US population is considered neurodivergent, so if we are not designing for these people then we are actually segmenting a big part of, for instance the US and the UK, and the world population. So now, moving on to the kind of meaty bit. This is where I want to hopefully get into some practical tips and strategies for you to take away. 
 
So these are some of the key pillars of designing for neurodiversity. And actually what you will find is that these are also the key pillars for good content design. There's a huge crossover between good content design and designing for any disability or for neurodiversity. 
 
So if you're designing for neurodiversity, by the same hand you are also practicing good content design and vice versa. So some of these things we want to be looking at our reducing complexity, being clear and consistent, considering sensory experiences of others, checking your digital assets and involving people and I will go into all those things in the next few slides. 
 
So the first thing we have here on screen is for people who can't see it, a gif simulation of what reading may feel like for someone with dyslexia. We see a few paragraphs of writing and within the paragraphs we have some words. The first and last letter of each of these words is fixed, but the letters in between those others are sort of jumping around, so it looks like the words are almost moving. 
 
And for those of you who can see the screen, if you try to read the words, actually you can see the your reading comprehension has drastically slowed, it takes a lot longer to understand what's being communicated. This example is in that hideous because we have fairly nicely broken down paragraphs but if you can imagine this was one long chunk of text and someone was trying to interpret that information in the person had to interpret where those letters were jumping around obviously that's going to be tricky for them to read. So one thing we can do to help with that is to reduce the complexity of our writing, of our language. 
 
So these are some fairly simple things you can do, and as I said you can take these away and use them actually in your professional or personal life to make the writing clearer. First of all, simply clear language which you may have heard referred to as plain English. That's essentially the idea of using language that your user can understand the first time they read or hear it. So use shorter words were you can, don't use needlessly long synonyms for words that have simple alternatives. Use words like "you" or "we" rather than using third-person and it will make it easier to understand. 
 
Using long paragraphs is probably the most common problematic thing I see but it's also the easiest thing to fix. So I'm sure you've all come across a piece of writing that has been lumped into one really big long paragraph and you see it and you think I kind of just don't want to read that because that's going to take me 100 years and it looks really confusing. So at worst, that's a best case scenario and at worst it really becomes a big issue for someone with dyslexia or struggling with reading comprehension. 
 
In breaking those paragraphs into smaller chunks and help with that in a good rule of thumb is to read over where you've written and identify where the breaks in theme and thought are and then when you identify those things, just rake them out into separate paragraphs. That will create a nice flow of information, and you have one thought in each paragraph so people are really easily can digest your content rather than looking at a big chunk of information. 
 
You might also want to think about making your shortences-- I just made a new word there, shortening your sentences. We quite often see, you will see some big long sentences that are maybe multi-clause using commas where you can Ashley probably shorten those sentences and make them a bit more concise and easier to read. You might also want to consider adding headings to your content. Again look at the themes of your paragraph and think of a way to summarize that theme and that would usually give you a good heading title for that section of your writing. This will really really help people to scan your content quickly and to find what they need and it can hugely reduce anxiety, actually, because people immediately know where to look for things. 
 
Andy can help with things like focusing and attention. Use sentence case. I have a whole slide on this, Would Leave That for Now. Aiming for, yes, low reading age. We really want to be looking to aim for a reading age of 9 to 15. That's going to depend-- is going to differ quite drastically depend on your subject topic. 
 
If you're writing a scientific report or something obviously you're more likely to use bigger words that's going to put the reading HR up, but generally we should be looking to write for a lower reading agent actually writing for a reading age of nine is not the same as writing for a nine-year-old. It's about creating content that can be easily understood, again, as I said the first time that it is read. 
 
And you will find that what quite often increases reading age drastically is just using things like longer synonyms then you need to. Or doing that thing where people will maybe consult as the source to come up with a crazy big long word when in actual fact there's a really simple version of the word you can use. 
 
So for instance, common ones you see are "individual" when you could maybe say person or "regarding" when you could say "about" . "Align" when you could say – so to avoid you don't need to avoid them but what you need to do is write them out fully, so you need to expand an acronym every time you introduce an acronym every new page you need to introduce an acronym on, make sure you write out fully, then you can bracket the acronym afterwards. 
 
Avoid things like idioms. Figurative speech, metaphor, some people can take these quite literally, somebody for instance who might have autism might take these things quite literally, jargon is another one, using corporate jargon when actually there are perfectly acceptable words that aren't jargony that you could use. 
 
And I guess also depending on your tone in your voice, a lot of the time you find that corporate jargon creates this kind of corporate tone and if that's what you're going for that's great, but quite often it's not. And jargon can create a sense of tone that doesn't quite fit. 
 
So of course a lot of these things are good for accessibility generally end should be baked into everything essentially that we do when we are creating content and we could go into length with each of these things, I could genuinely create probably just about create a whole presentation for each of these points. So I'm just giving you an overview for today. 
 
And just to put that into action a little bit, but you can see on the screen here, I have two images. The top one is I've basically just taken this boilerplate text, I think from 1/3 party site is talking about Hilton as a company. So we have a page title that says about Hilton and is just some generic information about Hilton, but in the first instance we have this really long chunky paragraph that has about 11 lines in it. And has some links. 
 
Then the image underneath is where I have actually edited this content and all I've done, I will just caveat this by saying I haven't touched any of the sentence structure here, any of the language, and the reason I've done that is to show you how easy it is, and this took me less than five minutes to do, to show you how easy it is even if you are bound by the wording say for instance you are working with somebody from legal and you can't change any of the words, you can potentially make this much, much easier to read just by adding in headings and bullet points. 
 
So before I went anywhere near publishing this I would look at it and I would review the sentence structure and I would cut sentences write down, because they are really long that I would probably change some of the words. What you can see here is that's immediately so much less intimidating. And if it about that gif simulation that we saw before of what it might look like somebody with dyslexia, that's going to be so much easier for them to digest, the second version, if some of the words are moving around. It's also less anxiety inducing. 
 
It's much much easier to find what it is you need to find. It's also just a better way to get people to engage with your content. Like, when I look at the first version I think that's going to take me 84 years to read. But when I look at the second version suddenly it doesn't seem so bad anymore. And that is really really going to help people who may have difficulty focusing on one thing at a time, and who are actually quite intimidated by looking at a big block of text. They might just turn away, they might just exit your website and go straight to a competitor, and it's just not very nice experience for someone. 
 
So again, without changing any of the material meaning of that text, I've just added in some headings and a couple of bullet points and it instantly is much more accessible. 
 
Title versus sentence case. This is a particular gripe of mine. On the screen we have a couple of examples. So first of all title cases where each word in a sentence or in a line is capitalized, sentence cases where each word is not capitalized apart from the first letter of the line. 
 
We generally-- we pretty much always read in sentence case and less, title case does take its place if you're talking about something like a proper noun or title of a book or film or TV show, of course we have to use title case. However, what often tends to happen is that I will see title case being used in webpages as page titles or headings on a webpage. And you don't really need to do that. 
 
The problem with title case is that it is harder to read, that's because we are not used to reading in this kind of pattern. So we predominantly read in sentence case, that's how we digest most of our content, most of our words are written in sentence case. So when you're using title case, it actually is comprehensive in time and quite often adds cognitive load when reading. It can be confusing for people with dyslexia because it makes word patterns of different, understandably, and that becomes harder to perceive. 
 
And if you have a webpage, and you've got lots of different heading titles on the page, once you start using title case, that's going to get really confusing. Also the thing that particularly annoys me about title case is that there is a lot of scope for it to be inconsistently used. So I have an example here, "the heart of a great trip is a great stay". 
 
We have that written in title case. But we also have that written in incorrect title case. That means essentially when you're using title case, prepositions like words for "A" like and less is the first word of a sentence should not be capitalized, but not a lot of people know that rule so when they are using title case, they are using it inconsistently a lot of the time which is kind of creating the worst of both worlds sort of situation. 
 
As us content designers no consistency is key to a good experience. So using title case also just creates more scenarios where inconsistency can creep into our work. Title case gives me the ick, it just does. I'm just going to say it. And I feel like that could be the name of my book which ironically would be in title case. 
 
So, a simpler way to structure our titles and page titles and heading title list use sentence case and that's going to be so much easier, instantly becomes more scannable and more recognizable for everyone. 
 
So, again, there are so any things that I could go into today, I focus on a couple things today because I think these are things you can take away and hopefully implement in your day-to-day lives. But to sum up this section of reducing complexity, what can you do? You can go away and create a strategy. 
 
I know sometimes strategy feels like a scary word, actually probably all that will involve is looking at the content you have maybe create a spreadsheet, maybe take each page in your website if possible, stick that into the spreadsheet then look at each page individually and have a look to make sure that some of the things I've talked about are present in your writing. 
 
So are you speaking in plain English? Are your paragraphs huge and long and impenetrable? Are you using title case where you shouldn't be? Is your reading age low enough? And just check, check against your webpage, check some parameters against your webpages and your documents and there are some really quick ways that you can make quite tangible changes to your stuff. 
 
And actually a really cool tool you can use is a website called Hemingway.com where you can copy and paste any bit of text into their text editor and it will mark off in color where more difficult to read sentences and words are and give you a reading grade as well so I took a screenshot of the Hemingway website I took some text about why cats purr and put it into Hemingway and it shows us with the more difficult to read things are. 
 
The readability is grade 9 which is not too bad I've scene things that are much worse and that's really handy if you are not sure what level you're writing for stick it into Hemingway and it will give you a sort of rough grade or age that your content is at. 
 
So moving on, as well as language we need to create simple design experiences. So we need to make sure our layout is clear and uncluttered, so the eye or brain isn't distracted from the information it needs. We also need to make sure that the flow of information on the page of the product is clear. 
 
Is it obvious where to look to get the information you need? Are your menus clearly labeled? I'm sure we've all been in that really annoying situation where you are on a website and you just need to do a task and you can't because you don't know where to look. You don't know which part of the site relates to which part of the task you need to complete. See you need to make it really obvious where all of the links or buttons or calls to action will take the user. 
 
And again if we get this right we can massively reduce the amount of cognitive load that we are burdening people with. And it also makes for a much less anxious and distracting experience again. It had a very basic level that increases the consumer ability of our content, if that's a word. Error text and link text, I've got a couple of slides on next. I will come back to those. Another thing we want to do, we want to make sure we are not surprising the user by using any uncommon design patterns. So for instance, if you have a menu displayed differently, or menu in two different locations on two different pages, that's going to be really confusing because people won't be expecting that. 
 
So we want to make sure that our page components are consistent across the full user journey and that they are not jumping around, that we try not to change up our design elements too much within an experience. And again this will just create up better user experiences of one and reduce cognitive load too. 
 
The aim is to take the burden off the user as much as you possibly can. We also want to make sure that we are using the same terms in the same language to refer to the same things in a consistent manner too. 
 
So we don't want to be using various different terms for the same thing. It's also important that we are making sure that we understand the language that our users are using themselves. So the we can reflect that back to them. 
 
This is actually where something like a style guide become truly useful, because then you can introduce things like maybe naming conventions or specific rules around language use and guidelines. So again, just going into detail on a couple of these, and the essence of time, a quick note on error messaging. The worst thing-- there are many bad things you can do when you're creating error text I believe, but one of the worst things that you can do I think is to blame the user. 
 
How many times have you been filling out a mammoth form or something and you finally get around to the point you submit it and you get this kind of passive aggressive error message that blames you. Something like "Oops, you broke this". Where you did something wrong. 
 
And ultimately the proper usage of the system really lies with the systems creator and not the user, that's why it's really important not to blame them. Or even more knowingly might get a really vague error message, so again say you filled out this 24 field long form and you get a message that says-- you hit submit and then you get a message that says "something went wrong". You did something wrong but I'm not telling you what it is you have no idea what the issue is or what or how you are supposed to fix this and it's incredible he annoying. 
 
Technical jargon isn't needed in an error message, so you don't need things like error codes or anything the user doesn't really need to know about. The user doesn't care about your error codes, they just want to understand the problem is and how to fix it. So for that reason you don't really need to put any unnecessary info into your error message. These are things that of course affect all of us and are really annoying. And that experience them personally many times. 
 
But they may affect our neurodivergent friends even more so. For some people, completing something like a big mammoth form will take a really long time and it will actually be a big compliment for them, and to feel like you are back at square one after doing all that, and you are still not really knowing how to fix something, it can be really overwhelming. So some of the things we can do to help with that are simply to explain what's going wrong. 
 
You might even need to consider creating multiple error messages to cover multiple scenarios, make sure you tell the user how to fix the problem, it is so annoying when they tell you what's wrong but you don't actually know how to fix it, so you need to provide solutions for people so that they know what to do. 
 
Make sure you are creating a clear response as well, it doesn't need to be wordy. Test your messages with people if you can, even if this is what we call guerrilla testing around the office to make sure you've got some eyes on. 
 
And also, help text might be useful to help avoid the need for an error message in the first place. I remember being asked to write an error message for one of our Hilton products and it was this little foreman there were two fields and the fields were labeled group number in property number and I was like "I don't think anyone is going to know what those are". 
 
So I greeted some help text, explaining what those are and where they can find those numbers. For instance refer to your confirmation e- mail to find your group number. That kind of thing. 
 
These are ways you can really quite quickly improve your air messaging and also just remove some of the many barriers for our neurodiverse friends and for everyone. 
 
Link text. Another easy one. A few things that you can do here. We want to avoid what we would call"naked links" a great name. A naked link is a link without any associated link text with it, for instance www.com/ locations/USA/Florida, some big behemoth like that doesn't have any text attached to it. 
 
What we can do is we can put a cozy little jacket on that naked link and give the link text such as in that case "local properties in Miami". Instantly looks better on a page but also way less distracting, more contextual so people will be able to navigate the page better and it's also really useful for screen readers, so often screen reader users will navigate a page by its links, so when they are flicking through all the links on a page to navigate it, and they hear WW W., Www., over and over again without getting to the meat of what the link is, it gets really annoying and loses the context for the link as well. Any platform worth its salt should enable you to add link text, so there's no excuses. 
 
Teams has it, Word, Excel, Gmail, Outlook, sadly not social media. And and think Facebook or Instagram allow you to do that with link text as far as I know. 
 
Try to avoid "click here", first fall because not everyone is clicking. Sometimes accessibility tools mean people aren't physically clicking buttons. Also we tap on our mobiles, we don't click a lot of the time. Also the idea is there's no indication where the user is going next week to be might anxiety inducing and annoying to not know where you are going and it can be really distracting not having a clearly set out path especially when you're trying to complete a task. 
 
So try to avoid terms also like "see here" or "See more", use things like "explore", "access" or "learn". And avoid terms that don't make it obvious where the user will be taken next, and make sure the link text is long, be concise for an action based link you shouldn't have to use too many words. 
 
A good rule of thumb if you're linking to an informational pages to look at what the title of the pages and you can actually just use that as your link text. 
 
So some things to do, basically the inverse of everything I just said. Label clearly, create hopeful navigation so people know where they are going, add context to your link text so people understand, explain unexpected behavior so if something is going to open as a PDF put a little bracketed PDF where it says "opens a new page", and the link text so screenreader friends can navigate with just the screenreader where they are going to be taken. 
 
So just a couple examples of those. More info. We have is one info, that is a bad example because it doesn't give any context, you don't know where you're going to know. If you are using a screen reader to navigate you wouldn't know where you are going, it's kind of if you don't understand where the next part of your journey as it can be a little anxiety inducing. 
 
So try using something maybe like "browse room options" instead, and see how I didn't use the word "see" there. You will have "click here" which is the actual hyperlink to book your room and then we have the "click here" frontloaded but it's the actual bit of text which is the important part so creating "book your room" actually fixes the link in the situation. 
 
A lot of the time future shift the placement of your link text you will be able to solve the problem and that means everyone using a screen reader again can much more easily navigated page because they know what action each link leads to. 
 
So what can you do? Again, similarly to before check your documents, your webpages, your social media, against these things. Is our webpage well laid out, doesn't information flow well? Am I putting unnecessary burden on my user by writing vague or blamey text, armor design patterns creating sensory overload or are my links naked or confusing? 
 
QuickLink on sensory experiences, these are some of the sensory experiences that might go alongside-- that might be prevalent for our neurodivergent users. Common causes of sensory overload for people, for example with ADHD or autism, I'd include bright noises, many noises, bright colors, extreme color flashes, clutter design or too many things happening at once. 
 
So to help with this we wanted to avoid things like overlaying text on top of images which is terrible for accessibility anyway, we also want to avoid too many images generally, because that might lend itself to cluttered design. We want to avoid introducing too many things on a page. 
 
One pagers for example can be quite bad for this, there are too many options to choose from. And possibly you get yourself into an endless scrolling cycle as well. For sensory considerations we want to also avoid videos that Otto play, this can be really distracting and create sensory overload. We also don't want any flashing images on our pages because these might be a trigger for people with epilepsy. 
 
We want to check the color ratio contrast to make sure they are not overwhelming for people and we also want to make sure that our designs are accessible for people with low vision. Ultimately the ideal state is where we give as much control to the user as we can so that they can choose the sensory things that they come in contact with. So for example, not automatically running a video play when you land on a page. You have the choice of whether you want to play the video or not. 
 
Digital assets. PDFs. I'm sure there are a lot of us here who understand the perils of PDFs. So, I'm here to really ram that home. Again this is a really small nod to digital assets because this is a massive massive area and we have whole talks on stuff like this at axe-con. 
 
But again I'm just focusing on some of the common things that I see and are easy tips for you to take away. PDFs, as far as I see them, they are really a hangover from the end days and they are not the best format for publishing web content. 
 
Not only are they not easy to edit, you have to go in and edit a PDF, reuploaded to your website, and it becomes quite laborious. They can easily become outdated for that reason. But not only that they are just generally not very accessible. Quite often they have a lot going on in their design images, colors, design elements, they are kind of made to look ready, quite often the main focus isn't on communication but on the design itself. 
 
And all of that is not lending itself very well to the experiences of our neurodivergent friends. And also they take people away from your site at a very basic level. If you link out to a PDF you are taking people out of the experience of your site experience. They also tend to be very big and not very easy to navigate. You can make PDFs accessible by applying some of the principles I talked about today, or maybe by using an integrative PDF accessibility checker, or even having somebody remediate it for you. 
 
But I was strongly against using PDFs where you can, and actually once you can consider is converting your PDF content into HTML content. For instance if you look at PDF the you have you might be able to copy the content in your PDF, copy it to a webpage, so that people can see that content and interact with that content as a webpage rather than PDF which will make it a lot easier for people for instance were using screen readers and again we are removing a lot of the sensory overload aspects by more simply laying out information in a non-designed format. A non, I would say, overly designed format. 
 
So consider alternatives for publishing or PDF content. Multimedia, if you're producing videos make sure you have captions and transcript available for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Images you always want to make sure you include alt text so people with low or no vision can understand what the image is conveying. 
 
Again, the theme here is to audit your assets. Make sure you are just checking over everything that you have, and weighing up against these things. Can you move your PDFs to HTML format? Have you got things like subtitles, captions, transcripts available for your videos, and are you alt texting your images? 
 
The very last note, I know we are getting close to time, involve people, conduct user testing with a diverse group of people to ensure your content is accessible and inclusive. That includes things like doing research with neurodivergent people, involving them in the design process and also reflecting the language that they choose to use. All the tips I've given you today are great, but they can't stand in place of testing are content with users, which is so important as part of design as many of you know. Find out one of the things you can do is to find out if your content is already being tested or has already been tested with neurodivergent users and if it hasn't, speak your managers and stakeholders and advocate for that testing. 
 
As a mentor for 15 to 20% of people in the US have neurodivergence, so we are alienating a large part of our market by not being more accessible design. So that's to summarize, to be more easily understood by people across the neurodiversity spectrum consider reducing its complexity, be clear and consistent, consider the sensory experiences of other, check your digital assets and potentially reformatting them where possible. And involving people in your testing. And your research. And that was a whistle stop tour of neurodivergent content design and I realize that was really fast. So we've got some time, I ran over slightly but I think we've got about five minutes or so for questions. And feel free, please, to connect to me on LinkedIn. We also have a chat in Discord if we want to continue talking about any of this stuff and you can always hit me up. 
 
So I will throw over to Justin, he will hopefully introduce us to some Q&A. 
 
JUSTIN MERHOFF: 
I will. Great job, Laurie we have a lot of attendees and actually a lot of questions, and here's the first one and we are going to go with questions that are uploaded. "What are your thoughts on frequently asked questions, FAQs, as a content developer I found him to be a mixed bag. If questions are frequently asked, then the existing content is doing a poor job of answering questions. However I've scene folks balk at not having them for certain areas, and I appreciate how they organize certain topics, especially going from generic to specific areas. Is there a best practice around FAQs?" 
 
LAURIE CAMERON-BACK: 
Yes. This is a popular topic in the design community, my stance on it is to avoid the more possible. The problem with FAQs is that it takes out any kind of context, and a huge part of what it does is actually placing the burden on the user to solve their own problems. 
 
So my take would always be, if you need first of all to have an extensive set of FAQs, that probably means your content isn't designed in a way that people are able to understand well enough. I would advocate probably instead to maybe use things like tooltips or to create helpful guidance within the journey itself and within these experiences. 
 
Because the problem with FAQs is if you are in an experience and you need help with something you have to navigate away from that experience and you have to find the FAQs, first of all, which are quite often hidden away in things like footers, footer links. 
 
You have to find it, then you have to weigh up what you are trying to do with these frequently asked questions. My stance will be don't use them. If you have to use them, with these guys, if there structured how to guys with different sections for each part of what you're trying to communicate with someone, people love them. 
 
Like our stakeholders automatically will be like of course we need FAQs, how will people know what they are supposed to do? In my argument to that would be we should make sure they know what to do without having to rely on FAQs. So yes, and there is a lot, lot of research and articles and resources out there about this so if you need to convince anyone, definitely go take a look at that stuff. 
 
But my take is always been avoid them like the plague. 
 
JUSTIN MERHOFF: 
I will go to the next question. "As a product designer of often observed that we overlook and don't have the awareness of accessibility typefaces we use in our designs. Do you have a method we use to help determine the accessibility of typefaces?" 
 
LAURIE CAMERON-BACK: 
Is a good question. And you know, that's where I would defer to one of our accessibility specialists at Hilton. So I can advise and create guidance around content, but when it comes to more UI based things I would usually go back to our accessibility specialist to ask. So I'm probably not the best place to answer that question, but if we have any accessibility specialists here who could answer that, which I'm sure we do considering this is an accessibility conference, then that would be awesome because I would love to hear about that too. 
 
JUSTIN MERHOFF: 
Next question. What is the best way to arrange copy for zoom magnification for users. Is it easier if the content has larger margins? 
 
LAURIE CAMERON-BACK: 
Good question. Again a specific question I'm not too familiar with, what I would say is the principles I've talked about today where you are creating nice short paragraphs for each thing you are introducing, each theme you're introducing, is certainly going to help with magnification. 
 
Because if you can imagine you have a big chunk of text and somebody zooms right in, they are fair quickly going to lose the context of where they are in the big C of text and words and also creating things like headings is really going to help with that. Because if you are zooming in and you can move around and you can see headings, you are instantly more likely to understand which part of the page you need to look at to get the information that you need. 
 
I'm not sure about the margins aspect of the question, but certainly a lot of the things I've talked about. Simplifying the design of your page, making sure you are including white space so not being to image heavy and not having big chunky paragraphs is really going to help when people are using magnifying tools. 
 
JUSTIN MERHOFF: 
I'm going to get a couple more questions before we end. "You have any thoughts on how to make content design more accessible for neurodivergent content designers?" 
 
LAURIE CAMERON-BACK: 
That's a really good question. I'd be interested to know specifically what things you would like to be more accessible. I think it also depends at what part of your career you're at, maybe? Because I would suggest there are things like maybe taking on a mentor or maybe finding other people who are neurodivergent content designers and seeing if you can mentor with them. 
 
I unfortunately haven't worked with any content designers who are neurodivergent, and I would love to, it is something we need and I would and hundred percent encourage you to do that if it's something you're interested in doing because I think having people that are creating and designing things that are also having these experiences is so in Portland, and we have that, for instance, in our accessibility team at Hilton we have quite a lot of people with low or no vision, or people with things like ADHD and I would love to see that come more and content design. 
 
So I guess my advice would be to seek out people that are already doing that. And think about potentially finding somebody that could kind of mentor you through that. 
 
JUSTIN MERHOFF: 
Again, thanks to Laurie Cameron-Back for our conversation and you can continue the conversation of community discord, if you haven't already you can view the link via the link posted in chat, and share your experience on social media with hashtag axe-con, and enjoy the rest of your axe-con! 
 
LAURIE CAMERON-BACK: 
Thank you so much everyone for tuning in and I hope you enjoyed it! 
 
 
 
Live captioning by Ai-Media