Same message. Different minds.
Different outcomes.
Organizations send policies, job posts, and updates every day. Many people never fully understand them. We are building a measurable language for communication accessibility, and recruiting a founding cohort to help shape it.
She writes a reply. Reads it back. Reads it again.
She does not know if it was a joke or a jab. A genuine question or a subtle challenge. So the reply sits. Sometimes she never sends it. This is called Response Anxiety.
That cost is invisible to most organizations. They measure readability and web accessibility. They have no score for whether meaning landed.
“I have always found digital communication stressful. For a long time, I thought the problem was me.”
1 in 5 are Neurodivergent.
Neurodivergent people process language, tone, and instruction differently than the writer expects. Three in four who ask for accommodations are told no.
Sources: Doyle 2020; Deloitte 2024
Neurodivergent people mask every day.
Rehearsing what they will say and replaying what they said. Every message, every meeting, they work to look like they process the way the writer expects. The cost is stress and anxiety.
A name for the gap between intent and impact
Communication accessibility is the ability of information to be understood, interpreted, and acted upon across different ways of thinking. Reading level scores simplicity. WCAG scores whether a page can be perceived and operated. Neither tells you if the person on the other end understood your meaning, knew what to do next, or felt included.
What gets lost
Trust erodes when people stop reading. Talent walks away from postings and onboarding they cannot decode. Time disappears into clarification loops.
Why defaults matter
Up to 20% of the workforce is neurodivergent, and most do not disclose. Organizations cannot see who they are communicating with. Communications have to work for everyone by default.
A proposed shared language for improvement
The VOICE Framework, developed by UniquelyND, looks at communications across five dimensions: Visibility, Orientation, Inclusion, Clarity, and Execution. It is designed to do for communication accessibility what WCAG did for web accessibility: give teams a shared, measurable way to see where messages succeed and where people get left behind.
Developed by UniquelyND · Undergoing independent validation
We are testing whether better scores relate to better outcomes
Our working hypothesis is that an organization's VOICE Score may correlate with metrics teams already track, such as engagement, support volume, and onboarding completion. That study is underway. We are not claiming proof.
If you want to help answer that question with real communications and real data, join as a founding partner. Full roadmap and methods live on our Research page.
See research statusWhere the work stands, in the open
We cannot build this alone.
We are recruiting a small founding cohort. Not customers. Co creators. The work is still open enough to shape.
Researchers
Help refine methodology, analyze validation data, and publish early findings on neurodivergent communication.
Organizations
Nonprofits, enterprise teams, and government agencies willing to run early pilot assessments on real communications.
Advisors & Funders
People in DEI, HR, and digital accessibility, plus mission aligned funders who want to back the science while it is taking shape.
“Either way, you shape the field. And you help make sure the next Erica does not have to hover.”
Ready to help shape communication accessibility?
Join the founding cohort, or see how your public communications score on the VOICE Framework.