Diana van Dulken talks about ADHD and things moving on screen

Di tells us that to make the web more difficult than it needs to be for disabled people is a shitty thing to do. And it doesn't reflect well on you. Thanks to Tenon 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 barriers they encounter on the web. First, I need to thank Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Tenon provides accessibility as service. They offer testing, training and tooling to help fix accessibility fast. Today, I'm talking with Diane van Dulken. Hey, Di, how are you? Di I'm great. Thank you. How are you? Nic I'm doing good. Very glad to have you on board. We have not spoken very much before today. So it's going to be a fun, fun interaction getting to know you. First question I have for you is what's your disability or your impairment? Di Okay, so I have ADHD, I'm quite a late diagnosed ADHD person, you would have found that a lot of females are like that. So I only got diagnosed with ADHD about five, six years ago. But yes, it explains so much about how I interact with the world. Nic I understand that it's actually very difficult to get diagnosed with ADHD later in life, especially as a woman, can you tell me a little bit about that process? Di Yes, sure. There's a bit of a discussion with my child about how this happened because my child was diagnosed with ADHD. And they believe that my psychiatrist, first of all said that I had ADHD, and that made their psychiatrist diagnose them with ADHD. But I think it was the other way around. It's because it's extremely genetic, when this talk was happening. In either case, it was basically Yes, you do actually fit all of those criteria. That explains a lot of things that we had previously thought was just anxiety driven, because of course, there's a very large overlap between. So but the process was, I already had a psychiatrist. I think the main impact, or the main thing that stops people from getting this diagnosis is that they need to have a mental health care professional. And that's actually very difficult for people to get in the first place. In Australia, we're lucky that you can get things like mental health care plans and things like that, to actually get these diagnoses. But I'm on Tick tock, for example, and you see a huge amount of people who are self diagnosing with ADHD because they reverberate with people who are talking about ADHD on there. But it does make it an official diagnosis, there's a whole heap of criteria that you have to match. And I had to do things like go and discover my school reports from very long time ago, because I'm old. And bring those in so that there was evidence that was actually existing as a child, but just wasn't picked up all of those sorts of things. So I certainly never thought I'd have to look at those again. Yeah, Nic That sounds like quite a journey. Di Yes, it was, but it was, it was extremely freeing. When I actually did get diagnosed. It was one of those things where this is going to sound a little bit sad. But for most of my life, I knew that I wasn't living up to my potential. And I would get extraordinarily frustrated with myself because of that, like, why am I like this, why other people would be able to do things without, you know, procrastinating, or getting distracted or wasting time or you know, not self sabotaging all of those sorts of things. So the diagnosis has been an incredibly good thing for me. And it's not always a great thing to put yourself in  boxes. But sometimes it can be a very good thing when it helps you to understand yourself. Nic Thank you. What would you say your greatest barrier is when you're on the web? Di Okay, so when I'm on the web, my greatest barrier and also possibly just my pet peeve, are things that automatically mov