Neurodivergent users, including people with autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, and Tourette syndrome, make up roughly 15 to 20 percent of the global population—in the United States, about 60 million neurodivergent users. The Return on Disability Group puts the broader disability market at 1.85 billion people worldwide, with an estimated $1.9 trillion in annual disposable income. Thus, the spending power behind accessible design is enormous.
This market is larger than China, but most companies are walking right past it. They are not doing this on purpose. They are doing it on the quiet assumption that the design they already have serves everyone well enough. But it doesn’t. The neurodivergent user provides the clearest signal of exactly where our designs break.
Sensory Overload: What Makes People Bail
Neurodivergence is not a single condition but describes how differences in some people’s brains change how they take in information, move through environments, and react to stimuli. On the Web or in the world, neurodivergence looks like this: someone lands on your Web site or walks into your store and the lights, the noise, the popups, the autoplay videos, and a wall of dense navigation all stack up until user engagement tips into overwhelm. When that happens, users do not push through. They leave.
The obvious fix is minimalism. Strip everything back and kill the clutter. While this instinct is right, the execution usually is not. When done carelessly, minimalism just swaps one problem for another. For a neurodivergent user, the bare-bones version of a design can be every bit as disorienting as the overloaded one.
A Better Solution
Look at what Apple actually built. They flattened navigation and laid apps out in high-contrast grids with large text labels instead of layered menus. They merged Phone and FaceTime into a single Calls app, killing a user choice that added cognitive weight and nothing else. Messages got an emoji-only keyboard and one-tap video replies for people who communicate better visually. Photos and Music dropped the nested folders that can quietly defeat anyone who loses track of where they are. Every one of those design decisions cut cognitive load without cutting functionality.
Now let’s look at what some companies routinely do in the name of minimalism. Many have collapsed their navigation behind three little lines, in hamburger menus. Out of sight is genuinely out of mind for neurodivergent users. These menus stopped working as wayfinding tools the moment they left the screen. Companies sometimes go with icon-only designs for their clean look and lose users’ comprehension in the trade, because a user interface turns into a guessing game the moment users can’t connect an abstract symbol to what it does. Companies turn on autoplay videos, which deliver exactly the kind of uninvited sensory input that pushes already-stretched users toward the exit.
The pattern that Apple demonstrated—reduced cognitive load, making navigation explicit, putting the most common actions up front, getting rid of ambiguous symbols—is not some special ruleset for neurodivergent users. It is just what good design looks like.
Here is the part most people miss: When neurodivergent users give up on your Web site, they do not leave alone. Cognitively accessible design also serves elderly users, low-digital-literacy users, non-native speakers, first-time customers, and anyone operating under stress or a deadline. This is not a niche. These are most of your users, trying to complete your most important interactions. So, to be blunt, the design argument moves from Do the right thing for the few to Stop optimizing for a fictional average user who doesn’t represent the people actually showing up.
