Nash Van Gool talks about ADHD and distractions on the internet

Nash says, not quite jokingly, that the entire internet is unusable for him without ad blockers! Thanks to Fable for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Transcript Nic Hi, I'm Nic Steenhout. And you're listening to the accessibility rules soundbite, a series of short podcasts where disabled people explain their impairments, and what barrier they encounter on the web. Just a reminder, that transcript for this episode and all other episodes are available on the website at the time of publication. You can find them at https://a11yrules.com. I want to thank fable for sponsoring this episode. Without Fable the show would not be possible. Fable is a leading accessibility platform powered by disabled people. Fable moves organizations from worrying about compliance to building incredible accessible user experiences through product testing, and custom courses. You can learn more about how Fable can work for your team at https://makeitfable.com/nic. Today I'm talking with Nash Van Gool. Hey, Nash, how are you? Nash Hi, Nic. I'm doing good. How are you? Nic I'm good. I'm glad to see you. This is our third go at recording this show. The first time I forgot to press record the second time we had a gremlin that dropped us. So let's make sure that this works this time. Nash Third time's the charm. Nic So we we have been talking a lot on enough primary through slack and Twitter. And you told me a lot of really interesting things about your disability. So for our audience, what's your disability or your impairment? Nash I have ADHD predominantly inattentive, which means I don't so much have the typical ADHD hyperactivity and impulsivity. I do have that to some degree. But my problems are more with attention span and motivation. So yeah, I don't have an attention span to speak of really? Nic How does that translate itself? When you use the web, then what what would you be say your barrier is or your, your pet peeve is around? Nash Well, I can't really, yeah, I can't really keep my attention on, on whatever I'm doing for very long most of the time. So anything that requires an attention span, to speak of is very difficult to do. And also I'm extremely distractible by things like moving images and sounds and whatnot. So that that gets in the way of staying on track as well. Nic What concrete example, could you give us a website or platform that is particularly difficult for you to use? Nash Well, the entire internet without an ad blocker is fairly unusable. It's, it's horrible by anybody's standards, of course. But when when most of the content is obscured by moving images and things that make noise and things that move around, things that pop up, it becomes impossible to get anything done. I don't know if any concrete sites specifically that do anything that gets in the way without an ad blocker there, there are platforms that are centered around keeping you distracted and keeping your attention on on everything things like tick tock and YouTube lately with the shorts or you get lost in there for hours. But otherwise, some bloggers like to use animated GIFs and things like that, that really gets in the way of reading which is a struggle anyway because sometimes my brain just stops Nic alright, I have to say I really liked this this answer the entire internet is broken for disabled people, which actually is true. But that's that's a different topic altogether. I think we could talk about for a while. If you one message for designers or developers around making the web more usable to you considering that they may not have control over ads and stuff what what would you tell them Nash Account for people not having the attention span to perform whatever task you want them to perform in one go. So that means things like not having a session timeout for instance, because f I need some external thing to use what I'm using, and that could be a password manager or an external website or an