Back to Insights

What a neurodivergent assessor notices that an automated tool can't

Lived experience, by the Neurodiversity Design Council

Automated accessibility testing tools are good at their job. axe DevTools can scan a page in seconds and flag missing alt text, broken ARIA attributes and contrast failures, WAVE highlights structural issues and Siteimprove can crawl a whole site and produce a compliance report overnight.

None of them can tell you that a product makes you want to close the tab after three minutes.

What doesn't show up in a scan

Feeling overwhelmed before you start

A dashboard with twelve panels breaks no accessibility rule, yet it can bury the person looking at it. An automated tool counts the elements without feeling the paralysis of not knowing where to look first, while a neurodivergent assessor opens the product and knows straight away whether the first screen offers a way forward or leaves them stranded.

Small frustrations that add up

Some forms clear what you typed when you click away, some dropdowns close if your mouse drifts two pixels outside them and some loading spinners give no hint of how long you'll wait. Each is trivial alone, and together they drain the capacity to keep going. An assessor with ADHD needs nobody to explain why these are problems, having abandoned products for exactly these reasons.

The sensory texture of the experience

Some products feel heavy, dense and claustrophobic. Others feel sharp, with colour and contrast turned up so high they set up visual tension, and others feel chaotic, with elements competing for attention like people shouting in a crowded room. A contrast checker can't measure any of that, and it still matters.

The emotional cost of an error

An automated tool can check that an error message exists, but it can't tell you whether the message makes you feel stupid. 'Invalid input' is informative, and to someone with rejection sensitive dysphoria it lands as a small punch and registers as failure. A neurodivergent assessor reads that message and feels the flinch, and that flinch is data.

The executive function tax

A multi-step process with no save button, a form that forgets your progress and a settings page that makes you redo your preferences at every login break no WCAG rule. They're still barriers for anyone whose executive function is already working at capacity, and an assessor with ADHD knows exactly how it feels to lose twenty minutes of work because a product didn't save when they switched tabs.

What an assessment involves

An NDC assessor uses the product as a real user would, working through the key journeys of onboarding, core tasks, settings and help, and noting where they stumble, hesitate or get frustrated and where the product supports them well.

They test with NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver and TalkBack, with keyboard-only navigation, at 400% zoom and with the reduced motion setting switched on. The most valuable part of the assessment is the one no tool can copy, which is a neurodivergent person using the product and reporting what it's like.

That's user research, and about the most direct signal you can get on whether a product works for the people it's meant to serve.

Why the assessor has to be neurodivergent

A neurotypical accessibility consultant can learn the WCAG criteria, run the tools and write a technically accurate report. What they can't do is meet the product the way a neurodivergent user does, feeling the cognitive overload, noticing the sensory build-up and registering the flinch at a badly worded error message.

Lived experience adds a layer of testing on top of technical expertise that no tool, guideline or neurotypical reviewer can provide, which is why the NDC makes being neurodivergent a requirement of its assessment method.