It’s Neurodiversity Celebration Week (17 – 23 March 2025) at the moment, so while most of our previous posts about Special Educational Needs have focused on the perspectives of teachers and parents, today we’ve asked a neurodivergent HUE staff member to write about the skills that their differences bring to a diverse team – and how they overcome the challenges of navigating a world designed for people whose brains are wired differently to theirs. Our neurodivergent team members have a range of differences, including dyslexia, dyspraxia, autism and auditory processing disorder. They work both with customers and behind the scenes, putting their unique approaches to problem solving to use every day in order to improve our cameras and software.

It is estimated that around 15% of the population – one in every seven people – is neurodivergent, which means that many people have gone through life aware that they think in a fundamentally different way to most of their peers. Neurodiversity Celebration Week acknowledges these differences and encourages people to embrace them. Our world would look very different without the contributors of neurodivergent artists, engineers and naturalists even though people don’t always realize that we’re already benefiting from that sharing of skills.

Neurodivergent people already know that people can have many different needs, having grown up in a world which isn’t built for them. This insight makes many of us passionate about accessibility and inclusion, and the best thing about inclusion is that the more we do to accommodate differences, the closer we get to making products which work brilliantly for everyone.

I have worked for HUE for almost 20 years. There are many neurodivergent people of my generation who are recently discovering that they have autism, ADHD and other conditions due to better understanding of how we learn to live with – and hide – our symptoms growing up in a world which prefers uniformity, but in my case I was aware that I was ‘odd’ from an early age even though I didn’t have the knowledge (or vocabulary) to fully understand myself back then. I still try to fit in with our neurotypical world but when I am asked why I also want to speak out about being different, I find the popular ‘zebra analogy’ very convenient.

“Why do you need a label? Because there is comfort in knowing you are a normal zebra, not a strange horse. You can’t find community with other zebras if you don’t know where you belong. It is impossible for a zebra to be happy or healthy spending its life feeling like a failed horse.”

I like this analogy because it’s easy to understand, applies to many different neurodivergent conditions and – importantly – it doesn’t try to downplay either animal’s value. Nobody will ever think that zebras are trying to say that they’re better than horses, or that horses aren’t useful. But in the same way, horses are not inherently better than zebras. The best world has both zebras and horses in it at the same time, and even though I’m biased because every team I’ve ever been part of has included a neurodivergent person by default, I strongly believe that neurodivergent people have a lot to contribute.

So, in the spirit of Neurodiversity Celebration Week, I’d like to highlight a few neurodivergencies which are especially relevant to our past work at HUE.

Autism (Autism Spectrum Disorder or ASD)

Perhaps the most widely known form of neurodivergency, autism presents itself in many forms and people will often have preconceptions of what an autistic person is like based on depictions in popular media, or from having interacted with autistic people with pronounced needs. However, because autism (like many similar conditions in this list) has been systemically underdiagnosed in the past, many adults are learning that the challenges they’ve faced all their lives are because their brains are simply configured differently to those of their peers.

While having trouble with the social skills which come naturally to non-autistic people can be challenging, it’s a myth that people with autism are all born with special abilities to ‘compensate’ for the difficulties that we face. In most cases the person has invested a huge amount of time, enthusiasm and focus into learning everything they can about an interesting subject, which makes us exceptionally good at recalling and applying information in our areas of expertise. Our tolerance for repetition and detail work also makes us good problem solvers and programmers; many pioneering engineers are autistic and it is thought that this pattern persists throughout history when famous, often ‘eccentric’ historical figures are viewed through modern diagnostic eyes.

So how does autism affect my work at HUE? Like many autistic people, I experience severe discomfort (a form of scopophobia) when using webcams – so perhaps it’s ironic that I work for a camera company and often have to test our devices! There are many accommodations which can be made to include people with this trait but built-in laptop cameras pointed straight at the user’s face are difficult to turn off and often lead to ‘jump scares’ in use. In contrast, HUE cameras are tactile and easily maneuvered into a friendlier position if a person doesn’t want to see their face on-screen, keeping them available for sharing work or other footage without introducing discomfort. Conversely, those who enjoy seeing their own expressions can simply tilt the camera towards themselves whenever they want. This helps autistic users to engage on their own terms, without detracting from the camera’s functionality as an all-in-one video/communication device.

Tapping into an autistic person’s lived experiences can be beneficial in other ways as well. Because autistic people have a worldview which is quite different to what’s considered normal, their ideas can seem uniquely creative to non-autistic people so long as they’re encouraged to share them. Working in HUE’s technical and product development departments, I have often found my alternate perspective to be an asset and I’ve learned a lot from our users as well. Noticing patterns in tiny details or changing the way we’re looking at a problem can open up brand new solutions that wouldn’t otherwise have been considered.

One of our most exciting products for people who are looking for an autism-friendly media hobby, especially those who don’t like being on camera themselves, is HUE Animation Studio, a stop motion animation kit which enables anyone to start creating animated movies without any prior experience. Once a new animator understands the ‘loop’ of moving the characters around and taking a picture, it’s easy to repeat the process and create absolutely anything that you want to depict on screen in a completely safe environment which the creator controls themselves.

Stop motion is particularly wonderful for non-verbal people or those with selective mutism because while recording dialog traditionally is still an option, you can also tell your story in as many different ways as you can imagine. Some animators can create beautiful silent animations which are entirely visual in their storytelling, while others can employ moving words made from modeling clay, pop-up subtitles, musical cues or wacky prerecorded sound effects to communicate entire worlds with their audience without ever saying a word. There are no rules to animation that aren’t there to be broken: it’s perfect for creative autistic people who want to share the unique way that they see the world with their friends.

The kit has also received coverage in Autism Eye Magazine (and it’s secretly one of my favorite HUE products!)

Dyscalculia

People with dyscalculia struggle with numbers and have to work much harder at subjects like mathematics than people without the condition. Like its more well-known (yet very different) counterpart dyslexia, dyscalculia presents lifelong challenges yet with the right support, sufferers will learn strategies to cope with those everyday challenges that often go overlooked. Finding alternate ways to do things is a common tactic for neurodivergent people!

Without personal experience of dyscalculia I would not feel comfortable in writing about it myself – fortunate, then, that mathematics tutor Atul Rana has already covered this exact topic in a detailed guest post about teaching dyscalculia students remotely with his HUE HD Pro camera.

HUE has also previously collaborated with Cat Eadle from Dyscalculia Network CIC, who accompanied us to the Bett Show in the UK this year. Dyscalculia Network is volunteer-run and exists to support and advocate for people with dyscalculia and maths learning difficulties, and with our shared focus on inclusion we couldn’t be prouder that they have embraced our cameras.

Dyspraxia (Developmental Co-ordination Disorder or DCD)

As someone who struggles a lot with fine motor control, this writer spends a lot of time thinking about how to manipulate even the simplest gadgets to avoid getting frustrated or accidentally breaking them (or worse, hurting myself!) A lot of document cameras have fiddly hinge joints or chunky designs, which require firm hands to comfortably adjust their position.

HUE cameras are built to be intuitive: you physically point the camera head at the object and that’s exactly what you get on screen, whatever the angle. You don’t have to position the camera right over a document if that makes it too hard to write without knocking things over; choose exactly how to set up your workspace and simply put the HUE camera in the most convenient location for you and your audience. If you’re struggling to tell left from right in mirrored mode, you can freely flip the live video in all of our software.

Focusing the image is another struggle for camera users who dread their dyspraxia interfering with what they want to do. Whether it’s manipulating a physical focusing ring or trying to tame a headstrong autofocus feature, repeatedly having to interact with a device makes it difficult to concentrate on the task at hand. One of the wonderful things about HUE document cameras is that they are manual focus, which means that if you know that the subject of your video is not going to be moving around you can set the focus at the start and forget about it – no fiddling around mid-stream.

Everyone is different and there are advantages to automatic focus as well, but if this sounds familiar then the HUE HD camera (with its larger, easier-to-grip focusing ring) or HUE HD Pro (with a rubberized focusing ring and a forgivingly wide capture area) can be game changers. The HUE HD Pro camera was developed with a dyspraxic person on the design team to ensure that its tactile features were comfortable to use.

Lastly, for people with dyspraxia who like to push themselves, our HUE Animation Studio kits can be used to explore fine motor control in a safe, accommodating way. Since stop motion animation isn’t filmed in ‘real time’, animators can work at a pace which suits their capabilities and plan out movie projects which play to their individual strengths. The ‘onion-skinning’ feature to help line up each shot alleviates the stress of accidentally moving something out of position while filming, and if coordination makes it tricky to use traditional ‘claymation’ techniques then you can simply animate something easier to manipulate, like LEGO® pieces. It’s a much more forgiving discipline than traditional moviemaking and finding creative outlets which aren’t solely reliant on dexterity can be liberating.

(I can also attest to the durability of HUE products when handled by a person with coordination difficulties; despite working for HUE for a very long time, I have yet to manage to break any of our cameras with my clumsiness!)

Audio Processing Disorder (APD)

People who – like me – live with Audio Processing Disorder experience significant difficulties in organizing the sounds that we hear, which means that even though we might be able to hear someone talking we struggle to understand what they’re saying. It’s a type of neurodivergence which is often overlooked as not many people have heard of it before and audiologists aren’t trained to diagnose it, but as somebody who experiences the difficulties that it causes every time I interact I like to explain it as ‘dyslexia, only with sounds instead of writing’.

Most adults with Audio Processing Disorder persevere for years without a diagnosis when hearing tests show that they are picking up sounds – even if they can’t understand them. Some of us have become so accustomed to not being able to hear properly that we’re experts at filling in missing information from the vaguest context clues; a very useful problem-solving skill! If sound is garbled due to Internet problems or a low quality recording, I’m sometimes the only one who can still figure out what is being said – because most speech already sounds like that to me. (Those moments make me feel as though I have a superpower.) I also like to write down words as I hear them because I can’t remember them otherwise, making me a useful notetaker during meetings and a speedy typist.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, advancements in videoconferencing technology came thick and fast which was a transformative experience for someone who had always had difficulty hearing in an office environment. I cannot emphasize enough how much the built-in subtitling (also called captioning or live transcription) in Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Zoom improved my relationship with video calls. If you have – or suspect – that someone in your team might be struggling to keep up with the conversation, I strongly recommend that everyone activates the feature on their calls. It’s also useful for identifying when someone else is having trouble with their speakers; if the subtitles are picking up the speech then the problem is at the listener’s end, not the speaker’s.

We have produced quick setup guides for using your HUE camera with Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Zoom because at HUE we support all of the major platforms – and we use our own products for video calls too! If you’re having trouble finding the option for live subtitles, just click the links in the text above to be taken directly to the most up-to-date instructions for your preferred app.

Even when teaching or speaking to people in person, a HUE camera can help people with APD to participate with confidence in unlikely ways. If you don’t have a dedicated transcription app, it’s simple to set up a private video call without any participants and activate the subtitling feature when lecturing in front of a screen, which puts a live transcription of everything you’re saying on-screen for the whole group to see. If that’s not possible, sharing the document you’re reading from so that people with hearing difficulties can follow along is enormously helpful, as is simply putting yourself on screen when you have nothing else to show! Having a clear view of your lips moving and expressions will help people with APD to follow the conversation.

The organizers of Neurodiversity Celebration Week are encouraging people with lived experience of being neurodivergent to share their stories, both to increase awareness and to change the narrative around what we can offer in a more inclusive world. Personally, I want to bring the problem-solving skills I’ve had to learn to accommodate my differences – and the empathy that I’ve had to cultivate for others who face similar challenges – to improve accessibility for all of our users, one step at a time. And I believe that being on a team with both neurodivergent and neurotypical people working together gives us all the best opportunity to do just that.

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