welcome to hacking Your 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 or try
and find any practical take 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 out there, and actually, honestly, this,
this paper is a bit different here.
So, um, how about we jump into, uh, what this paper is about?
Yeah, no, I'd love to.
It's such an interesting paper.
It's another qualitative paper, so we'll say just upfront, it's not
gonna 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 wanna 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.
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 is
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'll get distracted.
And so if I speed things up, it gives me less of a chance to get
distracted while things are going.
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, and quite critical.
Um, really trying to be ADHD focused.
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.
ADHD often comes with so many friends.
They were like, we're gonna have ADHD here, but doing this strictly just for
ADHD will be hard, so we're gonna just allow every anything that comes in.
And so they did have.
You With their small sample size, they did have a lot of other
things that were coming up there.
Yeah.
Autism, anxiety, PTSD, bipolar, OCD, these were all coming in as
well when they spoke to people.
And they also had, um, you know, more women than men, which was,
you know, unusual, although you know, not so much now.
Um, 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.
Yeah.
So one of the interesting things that this made me think about was, I remember seeing
a 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 videos.
And 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.
I feel like I span 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.
Um, they needed help with, uh, 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.
This is how I structure my podcast where I'm like do the introduction.
Here's what we're gonna 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 preacher way of
doing a sermon, and it's really good for reinforcing what you want them to learn.
Yeah.
Tell them.
I think my English teacher used to call it.
Tell them what you are gonna tell them.
Tell them and then tell them what you told them.
Yeah.
And I get why a 62nd TikTok doesn't do that because.
It's a even like a seven second one it's like that's, you don't
have enough time at that point.
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 know, remember
any of the videos I just watched?
Or I go, oh, I do wanna go look back.
And I like, look through my history and I'm like, what?
did I watch 37 videos between those two?
it's always, it's always very awkward.
You, 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 then you're 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 are 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 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 a 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 gonna sit here and listen to you.
Talk And if I am, it's gonna be 'cause you're in the background and I'm actually
in the middle of cleaning my kitchen.
Yeah, and it is interesting too with some of the ways that I have
seen video platforms trying to.
The things like where it's like we're gonna have a story, but in the top
half of the video it's playing a
Yeah, I've seen
that.
or it's 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
Wow.
just AI generated
and,
it always feels a bit cursed.
I'm not gonna lie, but maybe it's helpful.
The, ones that always get me, like I have something that's 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.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
And I guess if we were to move away a little bit from TikTok, 'cause 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, um,
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, 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 wanna spend a million dollars, but
they do want people to pay attention.
there's two sides of this.
'cause there's like what the user can do and what the presenters can do.
'cause 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 audio book and a. Physical or ebook version so that I
can read and listen at the same time.
Uh, and that having the, those two formats, I'm like, oh, it keeps me engaged
quite a bit more If I was just listening.
Sometimes I will be like, oh, I'm gonna do this other thing while I'm listening
and then forget where I was doing.
Yeah, 100%.
I think that's great.
And, 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.
Um, whereas if I'm at my desk, it's really easy to check my emails.
It's really easy to do other things.
Um, I also have a treadmill, so I'll sometimes will go on that and watch and
if I do wanna 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 chat bots 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, um, which has been great
in our program and, um, things like that so that I'm, I'm engaging with
it, like you said, on, on multiple.
multiple ways.
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 are 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.
Mm-hmm.
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 gonna be like every 15 seconds.
In reality, it's three, sometimes less.
Which is, it's, I'm like 1, 1, 1, 2, and I'm like, it's switching scenes in.
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.
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.
Even though it's supposed to be the most relaxing show, you're
just there to chill and unwind.
That's so interesting.
Yeah.
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 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.
the other thing is that having multiple people, like I really
struggle sometimes when I'm listening to one person, like an audio book.
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 doing 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.
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,
That's so true.
With there 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
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.
'cause 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 'cause they're not reading it at all.
Yeah.
Or if it's like a crappy AI
Yes, they mentioned that.
They mentioned that as well.
That is brutal.
Especially not just crappy ai, but also if you've ever watched Japanese, uh,
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,
Yeah.
Englishes going on.
And there's also separately from this paper, but what I've seen,
I've seen this online a lot, is there's a infantilization where
you know, instead of saying they'll have the regular thing,
but instead of saying murder on
there'll be the, 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, so we're going to shadow, ban your video or whatever it is.
And and that's a real concern for people who might have that happen more to them.
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 at unconventional organization and
I'll send you the PDFs so you can see.
'cause 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?
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 gonna stay engaged?
How are we gonna try and void dark patterns and stuff where
it's like engaging us with content we don't wanna 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?
Huh.
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 isn't also being
like, I want to make stuff accessible so people actually watch the content.
Yeah.
It gives us, as creators more information about how people who
are ADHD, which is the people that we work with, wanna curate content.
And then, yeah, I think for the people who have ADHD, it's, it's also a way of
maybe giving you permission to try things.
'cause sometimes people, I still talk to people who didn't know
about speeding up the video
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
It.
and then I like put it back to normal and I'm like, oh, this is painful to watch
now.
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.