"I Am Human, Just Like You": What Intersectional, Neurodivergent Lived Experiences Bring to Accessibility Research
Lindy Le · 2024 · Proceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2024) · doi:10.1145/3663548.3675651
Summary
This paper uses critical autoethnography to examine how intersectional identities shape the experience of neurodivergence, drawing on the author's personal journey of discovering, accepting, and valuing their autism and ADHD diagnoses as a cisgender, Southeast Asian American, neuroqueer woman. The author, writing from outside the academic research community, presents five raw personal narratives covering misdiagnosis and diagnostic gatekeeping shaped by gender and racial bias, the power dynamics of the medical-industrial complex, the exhausting labour of accommodating neurotypical norms, the privilege of being able to mask neurodivergence (contrasted with the violent consequences faced by Black and Brown autistic individuals who cannot), and learning self-compassion through understanding neurodivergence as contextual rather than absolute. Using Data Feminism—a community-reviewed, accessible framework by D'Ignazio and Klein that operationalises intersectionality through seven practical principles—the author analyses these narratives to derive three tenets for reconceptualising neurodivergence. The paper then applies these tenets to existing HCI research, demonstrating how neuronormative assumptions dominate technology design for neurodivergent users, from behavioural intervention apps for autistic children to ADHD management tools that impose fixed routines. The methodology is significant: critical autoethnography makes theoretical frameworks like Critical Disability Studies accessible to non-academic audiences while centring the embodied, emotional knowledge that traditional research methods often suppress.
Key findings
The paper produces three tenets for reconceptualising neurodivergence in accessibility research. Tenet 1: Neurodivergence is a functional difference, not a deficit—a set of unique traits that can be adaptive depending on context. This challenges deficit-based diagnostic frameworks and recognises that traits like sensory sensitivity or stimming can be strengths in some situations and limitations in others. Tenet 2: Neurodivergent disability is a situated, embodied, and dynamic experience—a moment of friction between an individual's current abilities and their present environment, not a static label. This reframes disability as emergent from context rather than inherent in the person, bridging the medical and social models. Tenet 3: Neurodivergence accessibility is a collaborative practice that involves embracing neurodivergent differences as valuable and learning from them to generate transformative solutions for both neurotypical and neurodivergent people. This moves beyond one-sided accommodation toward co-liberation and mutual benefit. The paper also introduces the concept of "neurodivergent questioning"—analogous to gender questioning—for people exploring whether they may be neurodivergent, advocating that researchers accept self-diagnosed and questioning participants to counteract biases in clinical diagnostic criteria.
Relevance
This paper is essential reading for accessibility researchers and practitioners who work with neurodivergent populations. Its three tenets offer practical reframings that can directly inform technology design: building context-adaptive tools rather than fixed-routine apps (Tenet 1), designing for fluctuating abilities and environmental factors rather than static disability categories (Tenet 2), and creating technologies that benefit everyone by learning from neurodivergent ways of interacting with the world (Tenet 3). The intersectional analysis is particularly powerful, revealing how diagnostic systems systematically exclude women, people of colour, immigrants, and those with co-occurring conditions—meaning that technology designed around clinical diagnostic criteria will inherit these exclusions. The paper's use of Data Feminism as an accessible bridge between critical theory and practice provides a replicable model for other researchers. A key limitation, which the author openly acknowledges, is that the experiences represent a single perspective shaped by specific privileges of education, employment, and cisgender identity.
Tags: neurodiversity · intersectionality · autism · ADHD · critical disability studies · autoethnography · data feminism · lived experience