Beyond Accessibility: Why Co-Designing with Autistic Users Is the Future of Digital Communication

For a long time, digital accessibility has too often been treated like a checklist.

Add alt text. Check contrast. Make sure the page technically works with assistive tools. All of that matters. But anyone who has ever tried to navigate a cluttered intranet, an overloaded Teams channel, a confusing booking system or a visually chaotic website knows that true inclusion is about much more than whether a screen can be accessed. It is also about whether the information can be processed without stress, overload or confusion. 

That is why I am so pleased to be collaborating with Queen Mary University of London around the wider conversation sparked by The Designer’s Toolkit: Co-designing online platforms with autistic users. The toolkit emerged from Queen Mary research into autistic adults’ online experiences and was developed to help designers and digital professionals build platforms in ways that are genuinely shaped by autistic perspectives, not just assumptions about them. 

Logo of Queen Mary University of London featuring a stylized crown on a blue background.

Accessibility is not the same as ease

This is the distinction I think the digital world still misses.

A platform can be technically accessible and still be exhausting. It can be available to you and still feel cognitively hostile. It can work on paper and still create a wall of friction in practice.

That friction often comes from things like:

• cluttered layouts

• multiple competing visual cues

• pop-ups and auto-play features

• unclear navigation

• inconsistent page structures

• too many social or interactional assumptions built into the design

Queen Mary’s research on autistic adults’ online experiences highlights exactly these kinds of barriers, including sensory overload, implicit social norms and digital environments that feel confusing or overwhelming rather than supportive. 

Why this matters to me personally

Back in my 2015 BBC and HuffPost writing, I often described feeling like a robot in a world that was not built for my brain. A lot of that was about the physical and social world, but it was also true online.

Digital spaces can be just as overwhelming as physical ones. Sometimes more so, because they combine speed, ambiguity, clutter and expectation in ways that are easy for other people to underestimate. If an interface is badly designed, it does not just feel inconvenient. It can feel exhausting, destabilising and alienating.

That is one of the reasons I care so deeply about this work through Divergent Thinking. Neuro-inclusion is not only about classrooms, workplaces and meeting rooms. It is also about the digital rooms we are all expected to inhabit every day.

Co-design is the real shift

The most important word here is co-design.

For years, digital products have too often been built around the idea that designers, developers or communications teams can predict what users need if they are clever enough. But when it comes to autistic users, that approach has serious limits. It too easily reproduces neurotypical assumptions.

Queen Mary’s toolkit takes a different route. It is grounded in research with autistic adults and includes methods designed to help developers and designers work with autistic perspectives rather than designing from a distance. That includes practical methods such as evidence cards and workshop activities intended to help professionals build a more tangible understanding of autistic users’ needs and preferences. 

That matters because autistic people do not need better guesswork. They need a seat in the design process.

Good autistic design is good design

This is one of the biggest misconceptions in digital communication.

Some people still assume that designing for autistic users means creating something niche or overly specialised. In reality, many of the things that make a digital environment easier for autistic people also make it better for everyone else.

That includes:

• clearer structure

• more predictable navigation

• less clutter

• lower sensory load

• more consistent patterns

• fewer hidden rules

• better organisation of information

When autistic users say a platform is overwhelming, confusing or cognitively draining, that is not a minor edge-case complaint. It is often an early warning sign that the design is inefficient more broadly.

In other words, autistic users are not an awkward afterthought in digital design. They are often revealing where the design is weakest.

The toolkit moves us from assumptions to evidence

One of the reasons Queen Mary’s work stands out is that it does not stop at broad encouragement. It translates research into practical resources.

The university’s wider research project explored how autistic adults engage with online platforms, what they find difficult, and what kinds of changes could make those spaces more inclusive. That work led not only to a policy brief, Making online platforms autism-friendly, but also to two toolkits: one for software developers and web designers, and another for digital managers and content creators in public and third-sector settings. 

That is exactly the kind of bridge we need more of: from lived experience and research into practical design change.

This is bigger than social media

Although Queen Mary’s original research focused heavily on online platforms and social media, the implications are far wider.

The same principles matter in:

• workplace intranets

• internal comms platforms

• collaboration tools like Slack or Teams

• staff networks

• public-facing websites

• student portals

• service directories

• digital onboarding journeys

Every one of these spaces shapes whether someone feels informed, calm and able to engage — or overloaded, lost and excluded.

That is why I think this conversation has become increasingly urgent. The more our lives move through digital systems, the more those systems become part of the inclusion question.

From research to real-world practice

That is also why I have been so keen to help bring this conversation into practical workshop spaces.

There is already public evidence of this appetite. For example, an Employer Workshop: Autistic-Inclusive Digital Comms was run as an online event in early 2026, explicitly framed around launching and applying the Designer’s Toolkit to real-world workplace networks, public-facing pages and collaboration platforms. The workshop description emphasised that evidence-based design changes informed by autistic users can improve digital communication for everyone, not just autistic colleagues or clients. 

That framing is exactly right.

This is not a coding class for specialists only. It is a design conversation about clarity, communication and usability. And it needs voices from across organisations, not just digital teams.

What true digital inclusion looks like

For me, true digital inclusion is not about “helping” autistic people catch up with a badly designed platform.

It is about recognising that if a platform creates persistent sensory or cognitive friction for autistic users, the design itself needs scrutiny. The answer is not endless coping. The answer is better systems.

That means asking better questions:

• Is this interface predictable enough?

• Is the information load manageable?

• Are there too many competing stimuli?

• Are expectations and navigation clear?

• Does the design assume one narrow way of processing information?

• Have autistic users actually shaped this, or are we still guessing?

Those are the questions that move digital inclusion from compliance into intelligence.

Why this matters for workplaces too

This is especially important in organisations that care about neuroinclusion but still overlook their digital environment.

A workplace can run neurodiversity training, talk about belonging and make statements about inclusion — while still expecting staff to navigate digital systems that are cluttered, overwhelming or badly structured. If the tools people use every day create constant friction, then inclusion remains partial.

That is one reason this work sits so naturally alongside the wider mission of Divergent Thinking. True inclusion is not just about attitudes. It is about design. That includes digital design.

And if organisations want to think more deeply about how communication, workflow and environment are affecting neurodivergent staff, this is also exactly where workplace needs assessments can add real value.

Final thought

Ten years ago, I was talking publicly about being frightened to leave my room. Today, I spend much of my time thinking about a different kind of room: the digital rooms we all move through every day.

Slack channels. Intranets. Portals. Websites. Teams threads. Public-facing services.

If those rooms are confusing, cluttered and overwhelming, then autistic people are often the first to feel the cost of that design. But they are rarely the only ones.

That is why co-design matters so much.

Not because autistic users need special treatment, but because autistic perspectives can reveal what good digital communication really requires: clarity, predictability, reduced friction and respect for different ways of processing information.

That is the future of digital inclusion.

And it starts not with guessing what autistic users need, but with designing alongside them.