← Hacking Your ADHD
Hacking Your ADHD
Research Recap with Skye: Video Accessibility for ADHD and What the Science Says
00:18:36
Loading summary
Transcript44 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hi, I'm Chandler Garcia. As a PICU nurse and global health advocate, I've cared for women and children all over the world, from Costa Rica to Egypt to Kenya and beyond. And no matter where I go or how tough the conditions get, I always wear my figs. These scrubs are lightweight, breathable and super soft. Perfect for long shifts in any environment. They've got pockets in all the right places, the fit is flexible and they're durable through every admission, surgery and post op. But it's not just about the scrubs. Another big part of what I love about figs is when they say they're committed to supporting healthcare workers all over the world, they mean it. I recently joined them on an impact trip to India where I worked in triage caring for babies in a mobile clinic. My figs aren't just what I wear, they're part of the impact I want to make. Wherever my work takes me, figs helps me show up ready to make a difference while looking and feeling my best. Get 15% off your first order at Wear figs.com with code FIGSRX that's wherefigs.com.
- [00:58]
B
Code figs rx Introducing Family Freedom from T Mobile. We'll pay off four phones up to $3,200 and give you four free phones, all on America's largest 5G network. Visit T mobile.com familyfreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phone via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement example Apple iPhone 16128 gigs 829.99 eligible trade in example iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end in balance due if you pay off early or cancel protect us. Welcome to Hacking youg adhd. I'm your host William Curb and I have ADHD on this podcast. I dig into the tools, tactics and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain. And today I'm joined by Sky Waterson for our Research Recap series. In this series, we take a look at a single research paper and dive into what the paper says, how it was conducted, and try and find out and try and find any practical takeaways. In this episode we're going to be discussing a paper called Shifting the Focus, exploring Video accessibility strategies and challenges for people with adhd. So I know that sounds a little bit other and actually, honestly, this paper is a bit different here, so how about we jump into what this paper is about?
- [02:14]
C
Yeah, no, I'd love to. It's such an interesting paper. It's Another qualitative paper. So we'll say just up front, it's not going to be generalizable to Everybody. This is 100% about individual's experiences. But what they wanted to do is they wanted to say, okay, we do a lot more video content than we used to. It's how a lot of people communicate. Now there's been focuses on accessibility for people who are blind, deaf, all those kinds of things, which is really awesome. But there hasn't been anything on adhd and how do ADHD people take in video content? What is the frustrating part of it? What is the not frustrating part of it? So maybe before we even jump into it, you want to take a minute and just go, what do I like and hate about videos? And then see if everyone else is on the same page based on this paper.
- [03:05]
B
Yeah, that was one of the more interesting things about this paper was just this, that this is not something I've typically thought about, but it's something that definitely affects on how I interact with certain media because like oftentimes almost everything that I watch or listen to, I usually speed up because for me, I will have thoughts in between what they're saying and then I will get distracted. And so if I speed things up, it gives me less of a chance to get distracted while things are going.
- [03:39]
C
Yeah, seriously, the only thing I don't speed up is when I turn on something to go to sleep. That's usually the only time. So yeah, they, they noticed a few things based on previous research about redundant information like captions helping, needing to stop more, things like that. And then they went and spoke to 20 participants who self identified as having ADHD. So this was not a diagnostic DSM. They didn't do that at all. This was people who said that they thought they had adhd. They also had a couple of other things. It was very personalized. These were long form interview content, shout out to Braun and Clark. Again, wonderful New Zealand representation there in terms of how they did this study. But it was qualitative and quite critical really trying to be ADHD focused.
- [04:32]
B
Well, interesting there too because they also like, because of how they did, they're like, we're not going to just limit this to adhd. It often comes with so many friends that were like, we're going to have ADHD here, but doing this strictly just for ADHD will be hard. So we're going to just allow every, anything that comes in. And so they did have, with their small sample size, they did have a lot of other things that were coming up there?
- [04:56]
C
Yeah, yeah. Autism, anxiety, ptsd, bipolar, ocd, these were all coming in as well when they spoke to people. And they also had, you know, more women than men, which was, you know, unusual, although, you know, not so much now. And so they. And they also had some people who identified as non binary. So they were really focusing on qualitative research and bringing in all of these different viewpoints to have this discussion.
- [05:29]
B
So one of the interesting things that this made me think about was I remember seeing some post on social media a while ago saying the real age divide is people who think content should be in articles versus people who think content should be in video. And yeah, my wife and I were like, yeah, there's times where I'm like, why is this a video? This would be so much easier to interpret if I could just stop it and just read the stuff I want to read. And I don't have to go back every five seconds to get the exact thing I need.
- [05:56]
C
Yeah, I feel like I spend that space. There's a couple of things that they found in terms of the. What they found in those interviews. Number one is frustration. It was just frustrating for a lot of people. They felt they were easily distracted. They felt that it needed to be more engaging for them or they would fidget, they would get distracted, it would be hard for them to stay focused. They also found if they started, they could go down rabbit holes, which I think we all relate to, you know, video rabbit holes. Watching one, then watching another they needed help with. Sometimes they used videos tactically as background stimulation. I 100% do this. And then, yeah, captions were super helpful. Was it too slow? That was another thing that came up a lot. And then just, you know, wanting it to be a little bit more. They called it redundant information. They wanted more like other ways of taking in the content as they were watching it.
- [06:57]
B
Yeah, this is how I structure my podcast where I'm like, do the introduction. Here's what we're going to talk about. We do the podcast and then afterwards, here's the top tips from the podcast. I had a friend that was like, this is. That's the, the Baptist pre preacher way of doing sermon. And it's really good for reinforcing what you want them to learn.
- [07:17]
C
Yeah, yeah, tell them. I think my English teacher used to call it, tell them what you're going to tell them. Tell them and then tell them what you told them.
- [07:25]
B
Yeah, and I get why 60 second TikTok doesn't do because it's a. Even like a seven second one, it's like, that's. You don't have enough time in that one. But it is one of those things where I know I've been doing the scrolling thing and then think back to the last hour and I'm like, I don't remember any of the videos I just watched. Or I go, oh, I do want to go look back. And I like, look through my history and I'm like, what? How did I watch 37 videos between those two?
- [07:55]
C
It's always, it's always very awkward. It's very humbling when you have a friend and you're trying to. You're like trying to scroll back to be like, wait, I watched it just before I'll go find it. And scrolling back through all of these videos, it was interesting. I think one of the things that really stood out to me that I understand and I appreciated is like, with adhd, one of the things that was really helpful was, okay, if you're gonna explain a concept, for example, and this isn't always possible. We're not all, we don't have unlimited budgets for video. But if you're gonna explain a concept, could we have a picture of you explaining the concept? Could we have a visual of that concept? If you're going to speak, can we have two text. Can we have text that's not too distracting? It's there if we need it. If you have a long form piece of content, could we have chapter headings? Could we have those summaries and explanations? Like you said, it's just thinking about it in terms of, hey, I'm not just going to sit here and listen to you talk. And if I am, it's going to be because you're in the background and I'm actually in the middle of cleaning my kitchen.
- [09:06]
B
Yeah. And it is interesting too, with some of the ways that I have seen video platforms trying to up the things like where it's like, we're gonna have a story, but in the top half of the video, it's playing game app kind of thing. Or I was like subway surfer or whatever. And you can actually, like, there are tools on YouTube to automatically put that in so you don't even have to do the gameplay yourself.
- [09:33]
C
Wow.
- [09:33]
B
Properly just AI generated.
- [09:35]
C
And it always feels a bit cursed, I'm not going to lie. But maybe it's helpful.
- [09:42]
B
The ones that always get me is like, I have something like, oh, it's showing. This is an interesting story, but there's someone in Minecraft jump jumping in the background and it's making Me motion sick.
- [09:52]
C
Oh, yeah, yeah. And I guess if we were to move away a little bit from Tik Tok because actually we recently did a whole episode on that. You guys can listen to that. And we think more about, you know, maybe long form content. So say you're at a, you're at a school or a university or maybe you're reading, watching something from a, you know, a workplace. And it's, it's a big piece of, it's a recording of a workshop, which is my, my least favorite. I'm currently in the middle of watching a recording of a workshop and it's like in the moment. If I was there, I'm in. We're doing it. Let's make this happen. Let's go post that. Having to watch the recording, it's in pieces. I keep having to go back. It's, there's a lot of preamble that you have to skip through. I try and make it as fast as possible. If there's no option to make it fast, then I, I don't like my day. So it's interesting. You know what, what recommendations based on this paper could we give to somebody who has a workshop recording? And they don't want to spend a million dollars, but they do want people to pay attention.
- [11:02]
B
There's two sides of this because there's like what the user can do and what the presenters can do. Because like on our side of things like having fidgets and being able to adjust the speed and stuff are great tools and making sure that we're not going to be interrupted. All those things. But yeah, from the presenter point of view, there's a few things that like the captions are a huge thing for a lot of people. Having that secondary visual stimulus of I'm reading while I'm doing this, it makes it lots easier. I actually do that already. I'll get like an audiobook and a physical or ebook version so that I can read and listen at the same time. And that having the, those two formats, I'm like, oh, I keeps me engaged quite a bit more. If I was just listening sometimes I will be like, oh, I'm going to do this other thing while I'm listening and then forget where I was doing.
- [11:55]
C
Yeah, 100%. I think that's great. And I think, you know, the other things you can do is, you know, where are you? So like, for me, if I really need to lock in, I'll probably go to a coffee shop, sit down, have breakfast, you know, have a coffee. And that's when I'll watch the video. Whereas if I'm at my desk, it's really easy to check my emails. It's really easy to do other things. I also have a treadmill, so I'll sometimes go on that and watch. And if I do want to engage in, like, bringing the content, then same thing you said, like pulling up their workbooks, pulling up their, you know, now people have AI chatbots that will like, walk you through what they're doing, which has been very, very helpful. We've started making some of our own, actually, which has been great in our program and things like that. So that I'm. I'm engaging with it. Like you said, I'm on multiple. In multiple ways.
- [12:47]
B
Yeah. And then another thing that was just occurring to me was the presenter side of things is just. Yeah. Having a still camera like we do, but we. In the videos that I put up, like, we're switching back and forth between who's talking. That's the kind of thing that just that little bit of motion does create a lot more engagement.
- [13:11]
C
Yeah.
- [13:11]
B
So having multiple camera angles or at least having perhaps a zoom in at sometimes can be very helpful. One of the fun things I sometimes do when I'm watching like a regular, like, network TV show, this doesn't sound like fun, but it is just something that occasionally pops in my head is I will count the seconds until the camera scene switches in my head. It's going to be like every 15 seconds. In reality, it's three, sometimes less, which is I'm like, one, two. Whoa. One, one, two. And I'm like, it's switching scenes. And like, it doesn't feel like that because it's just switching the angle or something, but it is something that happens quite a bit. I was doing it the other day with while my wife was watching Bake off and I was like, yeah, they do it too. Even though this is just a baking show, they are switching the camera angle so much to keep our attention.
- [14:04]
C
Yeah. Even though it's supposed to be the most relaxing show, you're just there to chill and unwind. That's so interesting.
- [14:12]
B
And so it's something that. That's one of the big differences between, like, professionally made content and something that's like those streams you see online and stuff. It's like, oh, yeah, this static shot versus something that's constantly changing. And because we've been trained with these dynamic things that are always changing, that's what our brain is desiring.
- [14:34]
C
The other thing is that having multiple people, like, I really struggle sometimes When I'm listening to one person, like an audiobook. If you are running a workshop and you're thinking, how can I make this more engaging? But I cannot hire an editor and change the frame every three seconds, could you at least have multiple people speaking? Maybe it could be more like a conversation or that kind of thing. So at least there's something interesting happening rather than just one person speaking. Because I think that can be really tough. Like, obviously it can be done. A lot of people listen to you during your sessions and then they're great when you're speaking on the podcast. But I think it's hard for people to just talk and have that be engaging.
- [15:21]
B
And the other thing that was really interesting that came, I saw in this paper come up a number of times was the range of people being like, I really like this. And other people being like, that's the worst.
- [15:32]
C
That's so true.
- [15:35]
B
With they're being like, oh yeah, the cap. Having the captions in the middle of the screen made it really easy for me to read them. And other people being like, why can't the captions be somewhere where I can actually see what's going on?
- [15:44]
C
Yeah, yeah. It's also about like people who can read fast versus people who can't. So I've. I'm a pretty fast reader, so if I see a caption, I'm reading the caption. So I can't. For example, if I'm watching stand up comedy, I have to turn the captions off because I'll read the punchline before the joke is made versus people who maybe read a bit slower. And so they find that particularly helpful or useless because they're not reading it at all.
- [16:14]
B
Yeah. Or if it's like a crappy AI transcription where it's not really what they're saying.
- [16:22]
C
They mentioned that as well. That is brutal. Especially not just crappy AI, but also if you've ever watched Japanese Netflix, they'll have the English. Okay, this is a bit of a tangent. I apologize. But they'll have the English version and then the English dubbed version. And they're different. So what they'll say in the English written version is different from the English dubbed version if you're watching. So anyway, Netflix, you need to figure your stuff out. There's two different. Two different Englishes going on.
- [16:51]
B
Well, and there's also separately from this paper. But what I've seen, and I've seen this online a lot, is there's infantilization where, you know, instead of saying they'll have the regular Thing. But instead of saying murder on, there'll be a gun emoji or something. And to be fair, there is realistic fears about having written captions being more censored than spoken word because they're using their systems to go, hey, we can read these real easily. And we saw that you talked about this word that we don't want on our platform.
- [17:26]
C
Yeah.
- [17:27]
B
So we're going to shadow ban your video or whatever it is. And that's a real concern for people who might have that happen more to them.
- [17:35]
C
So in terms of, in terms of takeaways from this. And by the way, if you want a copy of this, you can just DM me video @ Unconventional Organization and I'll send you the PDF so you can see because there's a lot of interesting stuff, a lot of interesting perspectives on this and it's quite a good paper. But what is the takeaway in terms of people going, okay, what do I. What am I learning from this paper?
- [18:03]
B
I think it's just that, for one, it's important for us to think about these aspects on our own level. How are we going to stay engaged? How are we going to try and avoid dark patterns and stuff where it's like engaging us with content we don't want to be engaged with? And then also, how are we going to, as creators, how are we going to make sure that we're being inclusive to our audience? What are the. Some of the steps we can take? And a lot of it's not that hard for us to do, like including captions, including making sure that it's visually interesting. And because as content creator, even though I don't really want to think about things like that, it is an awesome being. Like, I want to make stuff accessible so people actually watch the content.
- [18:48]
C
Yeah. It gives us as creators more information about how people who are adhd, which is the people that we work with, want to curate content. And then. Yeah, I think for the people who have adhd, it's also a way of maybe giving you permission to try things. Because sometimes people. I still talk to people who didn't know about speeding up the video.
- [19:08]
B
Yeah. Or I will then show someone a video on my phone and they're like, what is wrong with what you're watching? It is like they're jerking. I'm like, oh, I forgot I had this at 1.5. And then I like put it back to normal. And I'm like, oh, this is painful to watch now.
- [19:22]
C
It does. It does take a minute to get into the zone of the speed up. I think when someone else is on 1.5 and you not like understanding what they're saying right at the beginning is hard. And then eventually you're like, make it faster, make it faster.
- [19:40]
B
Hello.
- [19:40]
C
So you were just listening to a research recap. I'm Skye Waterson of Unconventional Organization. If you like that there's lots more information about ADHD and support for you@unconventional organization.com you can go ahead and check that out. Lots of free resources, lots of strategies, and if you want to join our programs, you can do that as well. And we'll see you there on Commercial Organization make this holiday season one to remember with Gold Belly. Your one stop shop for America's most iconic foods shipped nationwide. From the original Turducken to the viral pie Cagan with decadent layers of cake and pie, Gold Belly has everything to wow your guests with the click of a button. And with Black Friday around the corner, it's the perfect time to pre order unique gifts that ship right to their door. Use promo code gift for 20% off your first order on goldbelly.com the holidays have never been easier.
- [20:35]
D
Marketing is hard. But I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads, go to Libsyn ads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today.