I recently came across a text box on a form with the following caption (the domain has been changed to protect the innocent):

Sign-ups on zzz.example go through manual review by our moderators. To help us process your registration, write a bit about yourself and why you want an account on zzz.example.

When confronted with the text “write a bit about yourself and why you want an account on zzz.example”, I simply do not know what to say. I do not know where to begin with “a bit about yourself”. Do I begin with the day of my birth, decades ago? Or what I had for breakfast this morning? Am I expected to divulge things about myself which will make me feel vulnerable? And if so, will those things be kept in confidence, or will they be used against me?

For me (and I suspect others like me), the prospect of all of this is just so exhausting that it is easier to avoid such processes altogether (at least when this is possible). It’s not just the rote act of filling out a form—it’s draining in the same way that social interaction is. Perhaps neurotypicals see a prompt like that and sentences just flow forth, but for some, it’s a real challenge.

Now, I get that some folks will say “well, signing up for a particular Mastodon instance isn’t exactly a vital, life-sustaining process”, and sure, that’s completely true! The Fediverse is vast! But this happens to me at work, with ServiceNow tickets, and in other kinds of bureaucratic processes, too! And of course I get that some folks will, upon hearing that, say “well, that sounds like a ‘you’ problem” or “this sounds like the kind of thing that most people discuss with their therapist”.

But then what? Do we tell folks who need curb cuts or ramps “sounds like a ‘you’ problem”? Would we say that to folks who need closed captions or other forms of media accessibility? Accessibility of bureaucratic processes to folks who are neurodivergent, who have a touch of RSD, and so on, is just like other forms of accessibility. And we aren’t saying “you can’t assess or moderate or request information from neurodivergent people”. That’s not the point. The point is to make these kinds of request and moderation and sign-up processes more accessible to people whose brains are wired differently.

Broadly, this falls under the heading of what is now known as “service design”. Just as we have learned to improve the design of the built environment to make it more accessible, just as we have learned to make media more accessible, just as we have learned to improve accessibility in countless other ways, we can improve the design of bureaucratic processes to make them more accessible, particularly when we ask people to explain or justify themselves.

We can do this by asking clearer, more direct questions, by modeling intended responses, by making the process lower-stakes (i.e. by allowing a respondent to provide clarifying information or revise their response over the course of the process), and, ultimately, by reconsidering these processes in their entirety. For example, if the very vast majority of requests are approved as a matter of course, then is an arduous application process really necessary? Can the service move to an exception-based model instead? Can the service cull requests post-hoc, addressing them on a case-by-case basis?

What, concretely, does accessible service design look like for these kinds of requests? Let’s step through a few elements:

  • Clear and explicit criteria: If you’re only going to let your friends in, please say so. Make it easier for folks like me to not spend a lot of unnecessary time and deplete their social battery unnecessarily when they’re just going to be denied. If there is a stochastic element to the process, this is important to know. It’s also important to know the success rate. There’s a delicate balance between how many spoons I have available, how important something is to me, and how likely I am to succeed. Particularly for those of us who were (somewhat proverbially) always the last ones to get picked for a team or group when we were growing up, these kinds of processes look and feel grueling, even if they aren’t meant to be, and they end up becoming a real deterrent. It’s better to know when to walk away.

  • Defined process: How will my request be reviewed? By whom? Do I have to share sensitive information in the process, and if so, how will this be protected? What is the appeal process, if any? In the absence of details, a neurodivergent person may assume that if their request or application is unsuccessful, that they are banned for life or even that other actions may be taken against them1!

  • Defined parameters: Do you want 100 words? 500 words? Fifty pages? A thousand pages? Many of us are prone to verbosity, and will immediately fire up LATEX and start cranking out a manifesto if left to our own devices. If there is specific information you want, say so! Should it take me five minutes to compose my application, five hours, or five months? And if it is taking me longer than the intended period of time, how can I get help?

  • Examples of successful and unsuccessful requests: In what should have been a sign of something, as a child I learned how to perform many basic interactions, like ordering in a restaurant, by observing them over and over again and extracting the salient features into a script that I could play back on demand, like a computer executing a program. Only much later, as an adult, would I learn that such scripting is in fact a hallmark of certain neurodivergent conditions! But anyway, coming back to the example prompt—it would have been easier for me to respond to such a thing if it had been accompanied by a handful of examples of successful applications, modeling the features expected by the moderation process, and also a few unsuccessful applications, with pointers on what made those applications unsuccessful.

We have come to accept (though, in many cases, only after the imposition of legislative remedies) that buildings should be accessible, that media should be accessible, that reasonable accommodations should be provided in education and employment. It is high time for us to think seriously about what accessible service design looks like as well. It is not that the questions being asked are unreasonable; it is not that some folks should simply get a free pass because they might be flummoxed by a certain question, but rather how the questions are asked, and what supporting structures are put in place to help guide a person through the process.

(And no, the answer is not and will never be “why don’t you just feed some bullet points into an AI chatbot and let it do the writing for you”.)

  1. There’s a common aphorism along the lines of “it never hurts to ask; the worst they can do is say ‘no’”. But this flies in the face of the lived experience that many of us have, where seemingly innocuous requests have been met with unwarranted and illogical penalties, anger, and other unpleasant or even harmful responses. Over time, the lesson one takes away from this is “don’t even bother asking; not only will they say ‘no’ but they will punish you for having even asked”. ↩