Aversive visual experiences in the everyday lives of autistic people: Setting the scene for sensory accessibility in education and beyond.
Unusual sensory and visual experiences are a defining feature of autism (e.g., Tavassoli et al., 2014) which can create accessibility barriers for autistic people, impeding community participation and access to vital services (Parmar et al., 2021; MacLennan et al., 2023). Despite recent progress in identifying the visual challenges that autistic people face in daily life (MacLennan et al., 2021; 2023), the visual features of disabling environments have not been systematically investigated and are not fully understood. The proposed project aims to systematically investigate the aversive visual experiences of autistic people in a higher education setting. I will use participatory visual sampling to provide a dataset of university campus scenes which autistic students find visually aversive. Using these images, I will map visually aversive campus locations and I will conduct image analyses to identify the visual features which predict aversive experiences. A follow-up experiment will interrogate individual differences in aversive visual experiences in a large neurodiverse sample. I will analyse responses to the visually aversive images to identify clusters of response, and explore how these responses vary as a function of autistic-like traits and sensory-cognitive profile. This work will inform the development of a visual scale for assessing individual sensitivity to environments, enabling tailored support and improving practitioners' understanding of sensory sensitivity. The project will culminate in an autism inclusive design toolkit that guides educators and architects in avoiding visually aversive design.
The project will support the development of diverse and equitable communities in education and beyond.