5 ms·

not a criticism here, just a genuine question. What about this makes it friendly for ADHD? Is it a formatting/style thing? Information ordering?

malwrar 3y ago
At least for me: short sections with emoji, varied formatting, etc provide anchors for me when I loss focus and come back.
jfarina 3y ago
IDK. I think sometimes people lean into the idiosyncrasies of their own ADHD. I have ADHD, but I get sucked into writing code because it lets me focus in a way that dishes and laundry do not.
bigfatfrock 3y ago
ADD/ADHD diagnosed for >30 years now and I was actually curious if some new ADHD friendly web format had been discovered after my years in web engineering, turns out the answer is no.
- volemo 3y ago
  Like most accessibility issues, this cannot be solved with a format, only with care on the author’s behalf.
wnevets 3y ago
> What about this makes it friendly for ADHD? Maybe because each section is short and straight to the point?
- para_parolu 3y ago
  Isn’t it just friendly for any human?
  - wnevets 3y ago
    Some people are definitely turned off by a terse writing style. If nobody enjoyed long and verbose writing why is there so much of it? For the record I do think putting ADHD friendly in the title is a little silly.
  - haswell 3y ago
    Another way to look at this is that a lot of content is not well organized. For some people, this is an inconvenience. For some people, this makes the content impenetrable. In a learning context, most people benefit from better organization and concision. Some people benefit significantly more than others, and they’re called out here.
chefandy 3y ago
The chunking and labeling of concise, strictly topical content and illustrative examples rather than having paragraph-after-paragraph of exposition is a huge factor for my flavor of ADHD, though we're obviously not a monolith. For contrast, lots of folks love the expository format of the Python docs which explains a lot about why things work rather than simply how they work, but that setup is absolutely murder for me. My brain is screaming at me after skimming the first two paragraphs to see if I'm even looking at the right doc, and I'm hitting google or stack overflow 3 seconds later. It's not a good strategy-- I definitely consider it a shortcoming-- but other doc systems work much better for me. For example: C# regex docs: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.text.regularexpressions.regex?view=net-8.0 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.text.reg... Java regex docs: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pa... JS regex docs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/RegExp https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... PHP preg_replace docs: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php Python regex docs: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/regex.html https://docs.python.org/3/howto/regex.html Which one of these is not like the others? The Python docs are brilliant for people that click with that style, and as we can see from this well-shared and very controversial piece, (http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2013/02/19/the-python-documentation-is-bad-and-you-should-feel-bad/ http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2013/02/19/the-python-docume...) suck for others. Edit: As usual when the Python docs usability is questioned, cue the "well I've got ADHD and I just LOVE the Python docs" (said in the voice of the 'Well I LOVE SPAM' guy from the Monty Python skit). Sure, but you aren't some sort of standard by which others are measured.
- __turbobrew__ 3y ago
  I despise python documentation for this reason. When I want to reference the docs on how to do something I have to cut through huge paragraphs of unorganized and unstructured text to just find out how to do something. It doesn’t help that different builtin modules use different documentation layouts and formatting either.
  - 3y ago
always2slow 3y ago
Diagnosed with ADHD here, there's nothing ADHD friendly about this imo. I'm REALLY into reverse engineering content and I just bounced right off the GIANT WALL of text at the beginning. It's presented in a highly linear conversational fashion but the data doesn't appear to need to be linear. I absorb things in a non-linear fashion (I jump around, sometimes I even read/skim things backwards and out of order.) So it could easily be made ADHD friendly with clear delineation between ideas. A really simple way to do this would be surrounding definition blocks with a slightly lighter background color box and sticking strictly to necessary data, not using conversational language. Also the color scheme sucks (or rather is non-functional at least to me.). The blue text words really stick out, but the white bold text is what's important. However it also matches with the headers since they seem to be the same font and color, it's really distracting for some reason. Under assembly instructions specifically: like all I see is "value, register, destination, source, destination, expression, destination, destination, destination,..." literally the least important information is highlighted. The sidebar on the left is distracting too and pulls my eye constantly. Equating Beginner with ADHD is also mildly offensive and defeats the point if this is targeted at people suffering from ADHD. People with ADHD dive head first in the deep end or not at all, no exceptions. If it's labelled beginner/for-dummies, I'm skipping it or at best skimming it (like i did with this).

malwrar 3y ago

At least for me: short sections with emoji, varied formatting, etc provide anchors for me when I loss focus and come back.

jfarina 3y ago

IDK. I think sometimes people lean into the idiosyncrasies of their own ADHD. I have ADHD, but I get sucked into writing code because it lets me focus in a way that dishes and laundry do not.

bigfatfrock 3y ago

ADD/ADHD diagnosed for >30 years now and I was actually curious if some new ADHD friendly web format had been discovered after my years in web engineering, turns out the answer is no.

volemo 3y ago
Like most accessibility issues, this cannot be solved with a format, only with care on the author’s behalf.

wnevets 3y ago

> What about this makes it friendly for ADHD? Maybe because each section is short and straight to the point?

para_parolu 3y ago
Isn’t it just friendly for any human?
- wnevets 3y ago
  Some people are definitely turned off by a terse writing style. If nobody enjoyed long and verbose writing why is there so much of it? For the record I do think putting ADHD friendly in the title is a little silly.
- haswell 3y ago
  Another way to look at this is that a lot of content is not well organized. For some people, this is an inconvenience. For some people, this makes the content impenetrable. In a learning context, most people benefit from better organization and concision. Some people benefit significantly more than others, and they’re called out here.

chefandy 3y ago

The chunking and labeling of concise, strictly topical content and illustrative examples rather than having paragraph-after-paragraph of exposition is a huge factor for my flavor of ADHD, though we're obviously not a monolith. For contrast, lots of folks love the expository format of the Python docs which explains a lot about why things work rather than simply how they work, but that setup is absolutely murder for me. My brain is screaming at me after skimming the first two paragraphs to see if I'm even looking at the right doc, and I'm hitting google or stack overflow 3 seconds later. It's not a good strategy-- I definitely consider it a shortcoming-- but other doc systems work much better for me. For example: C# regex docs: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.text.regularexpressions.regex?view=net-8.0 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.text.reg... Java regex docs: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pa... JS regex docs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/RegExp https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... PHP preg_replace docs: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php Python regex docs: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/regex.html https://docs.python.org/3/howto/regex.html Which one of these is not like the others? The Python docs are brilliant for people that click with that style, and as we can see from this well-shared and very controversial piece, (http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2013/02/19/the-python-documentation-is-bad-and-you-should-feel-bad/ http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2013/02/19/the-python-docume...) suck for others. Edit: As usual when the Python docs usability is questioned, cue the "well I've got ADHD and I just LOVE the Python docs" (said in the voice of the 'Well I LOVE SPAM' guy from the Monty Python skit). Sure, but you aren't some sort of standard by which others are measured.

__turbobrew__ 3y ago
I despise python documentation for this reason. When I want to reference the docs on how to do something I have to cut through huge paragraphs of unorganized and unstructured text to just find out how to do something. It doesn’t help that different builtin modules use different documentation layouts and formatting either.
- 3y ago

always2slow 3y ago

Diagnosed with ADHD here, there's nothing ADHD friendly about this imo. I'm REALLY into reverse engineering content and I just bounced right off the GIANT WALL of text at the beginning. It's presented in a highly linear conversational fashion but the data doesn't appear to need to be linear. I absorb things in a non-linear fashion (I jump around, sometimes I even read/skim things backwards and out of order.) So it could easily be made ADHD friendly with clear delineation between ideas. A really simple way to do this would be surrounding definition blocks with a slightly lighter background color box and sticking strictly to necessary data, not using conversational language. Also the color scheme sucks (or rather is non-functional at least to me.). The blue text words really stick out, but the white bold text is what's important. However it also matches with the headers since they seem to be the same font and color, it's really distracting for some reason. Under assembly instructions specifically: like all I see is "value, register, destination, source, destination, expression, destination, destination, destination,..." literally the least important information is highlighted. The sidebar on the left is distracting too and pulls my eye constantly. Equating Beginner with ADHD is also mildly offensive and defeats the point if this is targeted at people suffering from ADHD. People with ADHD dive head first in the deep end or not at all, no exceptions. If it's labelled beginner/for-dummies, I'm skipping it or at best skimming it (like i did with this).