Discover how to create technology that supports neurodivergent individuals. Dr. Julie Eshleman shares insights on disability inclusion and assistive tech.

In a world where technology increasingly shapes our daily lives, how can we ensure it serves everyone, particularly those with neurodivergent conditions? This question is at the heart of Dr. Julie Eshleman's research and experience. In this episode, we'll explore her insights on designing technology that truly supports neurodivergent individuals, examining the intersection of lived experience and academic research.

About Dr. Julie Eshleman

Dr. Julie Eshleman is a postdoctoral research fellow at Georgia Tech’s Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation and a Georgia LEND fellow at Georgia State University. With over 20 years of experience in education, behavior analysis, and organizational psychology. Her PhD work at the University of Stirling focused on how disabled adults utilize technology to foster independence in care settings, and she has presented her findings at prestigious forums like the United Nations.

www.drjuliedisabilityinclusion.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/julieeshlemanatresearcher/

Hi, everyone.

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Welcome to the NeuroSec podcast.

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I'm your host, Nathan Chung.

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Today, I'm thrilled to welcome Dr.

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Julie Eshleman to NeuroSec.

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Julie is a postdoctoral research fellow at Georgia Tech Center for Inclusive Design and

Innovation, a Georgia LEND fellow at Georgia State University.

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But what makes Julie's work so compelling?

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She's not just studying disability inclusion and assistive technology from the outside.

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She's living it.

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As an openly autistic reader with over 20 years experience spanning education, behavior

analysis, and organizational psychology, Julie brings both rigorous academic research and

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deeply historical, deeply personal insights to everything she does.

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Her PhD work at the University of Sterling explored how

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disabled adults use technology to build independence and autonomy in care settings across

the UK, which is amazing.

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She presented her findings to the United Nations in Vienna and the the parliament in the

UK.

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And now she's here.

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She's uh in Atlanta, Georgia.

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She's in Georgia and asking the questions that matter most.

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How do we design technology that actually works for neurodivergent brains?

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What does true

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workplace inclusion look like for autistic professionals?

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And how do we center disabled people's voices in the systems built to serve them?

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Julie, welcome to the show.

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Thank so much for having me.

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I'm excited.

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Excellent.

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Okay.

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Your career has spanned education, clinical behavior analysis, organizational psychology,

nonprofit work, and research across both the UK and US.

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What thread connects all these chapters for you?

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So I would say the thread, I mean, the thread really is inclusion.

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I've spent a lot of years working at the person level, working with kids, adults, their

families to help them build the skills that they need to operate well and thrive in a

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world that was not built for them or their brains or their bodies.

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And I think kind of across the course of my work, I have zoomed out a little bit at a time

to working on

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not just equipping the people at kind of the contact individual level with the skills that

they need to succeed, but also starting to then chip away at the systems that are making

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it so darn difficult for them to thrive.

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So I have kind of moved up into more systems level approaches, some policy work, research

that I am disseminating in a lot of different ways so that practitioners can think a

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little bit differently and that systems won't be quite as oppressive.

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for disabled people as they have been built to be in the past.

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The thread of continuity lands leads directly to your lived experience and how it shapes

your research perspective.

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When did you first realize that your lived experience as an autistic person wasn't just

personal context, but actually an asset that could strengthen your research?

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Ooh, you know, it took a long time.

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I think it took a really long time for me to cope with a diagnosis, I think.

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And it wasn't because I rejected that identity, but it was because the space that I was

in, I wasn't able to hold both.

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I was a clinical practitioner.

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I worked in applied behavior analysis.

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And while I think I...

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I operated at a very neuroaffirming level even before neuroaffirming was cool.

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I still didn't have, I didn't have the capacity or the professional autonomy to hold those

dual So I was either the person who was autistic or I was the person who was fixing the

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people who are autistic.

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And I ended up clinging to that first version of the identity for a lot longer than I in

hindsight wish I had.

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Okay, so when did you first realize that your lived experience as an autistic person

wasn't just personal, but actually a professional asset that could strengthen your

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research?

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So I think I spent a long time professionally learning how autistic brains work and just

neurodiverse brains and, you know, as a teacher figuring out the different ways that I

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need to teach so that kids get the skills that they need and the adults get the skills

that they need to teach the kids the skills they need.

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So I think I spent a lot of time learning how those brains work and it took me a lot

longer than I'm proud to admit to apply those to myself.

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I think I didn't.

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really recognize it as a professional asset rather than a struggle until I did my PhD,

which actually is very well suited for an autistic brain that wants to deep, deep, deep

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dive on a very, very narrow niche topic and spend several years there learning absolutely

everything about the terrain of this very narrow thing.

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And it turns out that's kind of my jam.

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I was, after going through that experience, I kind of was like, oh, well,

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That is something that I can do in the rest of my professional life.

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Like can use these skills that I'm enjoying so much to get really, really good at a narrow

set of things.

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Why have I not been leveraging that before?

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So I think it was during the PhD that I was like, brain hack.

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This is how I need to structure my work.

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Yep.

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And to some now is something that's more controversial.

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So you have moved in and out of ABA while being openly autistic yourself.

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How do you navigate that road?

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That that road, that past road, given the critiques and criticism of ABA in the autistic

community?

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I think that I've gotten better at holding dual identities.

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That's one thing.

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I've gotten better at being able to be the professional who is trying to provide supports

to equip people to thrive in spaces and places that are just not built or designed for

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their success, as well as being one of those people who is continuously in the systems

that are not built for my success.

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So I think.

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It was hard.

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It's hard for me to practice in clinics because there is still a lot of us versus them.

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Even when no one is outwardly articulating that there is still very much you are a fixer

or you are the person that needs to be fixed.

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And I kind of am always in the middle like, but I'm not broken.

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So I, there are skills that I am not naturally learning the way other people naturally

learn them and could use some support.

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And so I think I relate.

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to kids and the young adults and adults that I have worked with kind of across the span of

my career.

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I've worked with all age groups and I relate very closely to them and I feel like I have

the benefit of understanding how I would like a professional to treat me if they were

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teaching me skills and the kind of respect that I would demand to have from someone who is

supporting me and I try to be the person that I wish I had when I was younger, when I was

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in high school, when I was in college.

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Teach kind of skills in a compassionate way.

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Yeah, that resonates to me because growing up I had no support, zero support.

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Yeah.

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Well, and I think that on the other hand, the critiques of applied behavior analysis are

valid.

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Like there has been a lot of harm caused by practitioners who just don't have a wide

enough perspective.

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Like they have a very narrow understanding of how their skills should be used.

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They have a fairly narrow understanding of what they should be focusing on.

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mean, it is inherently kind of a deficit based model.

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You know, you're trained in grad school to assess kids and find out the things that

they're not learning and then work on those things, which is fine, right?

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You're supposed to learn the skills that you're not naturally learning.

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Otherwise it wouldn't be a good use of time.

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But not all of those skills have to be taught just because they're not there.

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I think that kind of moving professionals who are coming out of grad school now are moving

a little bit more towards a strength-based approach and saying.

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not every deficit has to be addressed.

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Not every skill that you're not learning has to be addressed.

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Maybe you build life where you won't need that skill.

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That's an idea.

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So I think that acknowledging that ABA has kind of been used to shove people into

personalities and boxes and behaviors that were not, are not well suited for them.

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That is a valid critique.

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And I have tried very hard to distance myself from that kind of practice.

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That's good.

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So next, I noticed from your research, you identified four user-defined outcomes like

autonomy, independence, well-being, and social inclusion in your research.

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Why was it important that these came from users and not from clinicians or researchers?

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I think that clinicians and researchers are often guilty of thinking they understand the

problem and then just taking off towards a solution.

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And I have been practicing for more years than I care to count.

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And over that course of time have seen too many times tech developers or product inventors

or anybody get to the end where they are proudly delivering this solution that they have

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come up with to people who are like,

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That's interesting, but that's not what I needed.

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That's not a problem for me.

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I don't need that thing.

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So I feel like you're at risk if you're not doing that, if you're not kind of

co-developing and focusing on the outcomes that users need, you're at real risk of just

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serving an organization or serving a company or serving the interests of not your target

audience or not your consumer base.

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Researchers think they know the problem and researchers know a lot, but

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Not a lot of them have lived experience.

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We still have lot of problems with kind of the pipeline of getting disabled people into

research, learning research skills, and then getting them into kind of valid rigorous

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research roles.

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And that means that researchers have to be that much more diligent in making sure that

they're actually addressing problems or looking for solutions to things that are a real

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life problem for people.

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Yep, I totally agree.

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So next, you said you discovered that small differences in how people felt had a huge

impact on whether the technology got used.

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Can you unpack that?

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What emotional or contextual factors make or break technology adoption?

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I love this one.

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So I learned a lot of this during my PhD.

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I was helping deliver assistive technology for disabled tech users in care homes in the

UK.

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So inherently they're pretty high support settings.

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So it was really cool to get to give people the tools that they wanted to have a little

bit more autonomy, even in a space with a lot of supports.

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So one of the things that really made or break

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adoption was kind of the understanding of the staff of what that meant for their role.

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You know, when you talk to people whose job it is, is to support people on a day to day

basis in daily tasks and you talk to them about, isn't it great to make them more

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independent?

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All they hear are alarm bells like, no, if he's more independent, I don't have a job.

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Like that, that doesn't work for me.

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So while we know conceptually, we're supposed to say we're working towards people being

more autonomous, being more independent.

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practically from a practical perspective, people hear my hours will be cut and that means

they're not really going to engage with that technology.

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And if the technology is bothering support workers, people don't use it because they care

about their support workers.

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They care about when they are overworked and when they are stressed because they're not

getting the right kinds of engagement or supports from people who are stretched so thin.

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So the tech users themselves did not want to push

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learning about this technology so that I can do this thing to their care workers because

they could tell that it was stressful.

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So the sites where they understood culturally, understood independence does not mean you

don't need me.

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It means you need me to do something different.

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Like maybe you need me to make sure that it is connected to wifi and you need support with

the tool rather than with the task so that you can do the task.

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And on the places where

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the staff work super on board and excited about it, there is a totally different shift.

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And I think that that also contributes to kind of the social culture, right?

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There's a stigmatization of using some kinds of assistive technologies.

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And for some reason in some places, people would rather not be able to communicate than

communicate in a way that is slow or that looks different from everybody else or that is

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really effortful.

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And so the places where they were like, take your time, let's use this AAC device.

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We want to know what you really think.

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And we're excited to hear that user voice.

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People used it more and then got more fluent.

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So then they got better at it then it got faster and then it was more accepted.

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So it's kind of a, it's a self feeding culture.

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It builds on itself.

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That is amazing.

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And that brings us to the technology itself.

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So your publication, Everyday Tech, Everyday Autonomy, emphasizes everyday technology.

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What's the gap you see between how researchers and funders think about assistive

technology versus what disabled people actually need day to day?

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So the thing that I think about the most is how iPads often are not covered as assistive

technology because they're still seen as like toys or personal tech, which assistive

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technology is personal because it's personalized.

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So I think the biggest gap between how researchers and funders think about the tools that

somebody needs is that for some reason when you get a dedicated single use system,

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that's okay to use insurance funding or Medicaid or other kinds of grants to buy, but an

iPad and an Apple smart system, those are not okay because those are toys.

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So we have people who are building the same systems that are not having nice

interoperability with other kinds of tech.

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And then we're siloing those and making them really inaccessible.

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And so I think

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I talk about mainstream tech because it's more affordable than a specialist system that

does the same thing and doesn't play nicely with any of the other tools.

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You make a very good point about that.

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And now the gap is getting even more complex as with AI coming on the forefront.

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I talked about this when I was at CES 2025 last year, where I talked about how AI is

ushering in a golden age and AI will now enable people to use technology more, even more

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so than ever before.

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your current...

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conducting your post-doctoral research at Georgia Tech on AI-powered assistive technology

and the hiring potential AI policies could impact the technologies that disabled people

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use.

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With AI increasingly embedded in assistive technology, what are the key considerations you

think people need to know about?

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So I feel like the gap in what is covered in the literature is what has my interest right

now.

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And it is that we have scoped the problem really well.

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We have spent a lot of time in literature admiring and saying, you know, well, there are

privacy risks and you know, there's data security risks that we need to be aware of.

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you know, not everybody has the infrastructure for that kind of data processing and that

kind of power.

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Not everybody has stable.

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data access or electricity access.

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so we've admired the problem a lot.

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We've spent very little time talking about the policy solutions that are available to us

to start addressing those things.

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So there are, I kind of put them in two buckets.

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I'm calling them carrots and sticks, but there are incentive based strategies that we can

use to make technology easier to use, easier to access, more affordable.

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have better longevity and sustainability.

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And then there are policy tools that we can use to deter bad behavior that is excluding

people from accessing the assistive technologies.

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And we have spent a lot of time talking about the problems, but we're not matching them

with the few known solutions that we have.

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So I am starting to talk to people who are in the disability or technology or policy or

all of the above spaces to talk about what do we think the priorities are and then

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unpicking those certain market shaping strategies or accessibility kind of baseline

thresholds for people to have market access.

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And what those things, if we were to put those things in place, what does that mean for

disabled people's autonomy?

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What does it mean for their reliance on devices?

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To start to see as we're listening for tech policy that is continuously developing,

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What are the red flags we should be listening for and go up?

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But if they do that, that will impact disabled people in this way.

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That's not being talked about.

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So that's kind of what I'm trying to build, just a framework for us to listen to tech

policy and see where we should be concerned.

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want to dive into that, the AI part real quick again, more deeper dive.

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Among the AI powered assistive technologies, which ones excite you most and which do you

think has the greatest, what do call it, potential benefit for the communities?

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That is a great question.

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So the one that I see the most that I personally get excited about is the large language

models that are being used to make AI powered AAC devices faster.

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So having faster recognition so that people don't have to manually type out entire words.

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It makes a stunning difference in the pace of conversation when someone is using an AAC

device for vocal output.

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to not have to type every single letter.

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So as those models get better and better, people can communicate much closer to what we

would consider real-time kind of conversational speed, which is a game changer because it

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is so difficult for someone to talk to someone like they are an adult when they feel like

they're waiting and waiting.

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You know, it puts you in kind of a parent-child sort of interaction frame versus when the

person can communicate back.

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almost as quickly or as quickly as kind of the conversational pace allows.

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So that's the one that excites me the most, but I think that there is also a lot of

potential in smart home tech and kind of mapping habitual behaviors so that it reduces the

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amount that somebody has to interact with their technology in order to have their house

set up the way they want it.

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So it can kind of learn what temperatures do you want at different times?

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When do you want the blinds on this side of the house to close because that's where the

sun is and things like that.

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So then it gets lower and lower effort for your space to be exactly the way you want it.

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And I think that that is a freedom that a lot of disabled people have never had before.

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Yep.

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it reminds me, think that technology has been available for a while, but it's usually

reserved for the privileged.

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I just hope it becomes affordable.

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Yes, and it is getting there.

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more companies that have, you know, it always starts in someone who wants their house to

be voice activated like Iron Man, you know, in Marvel movies, but it eventually trickles

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down to it's affordable now for almost everybody.

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I mean, we know in the UK, care workers do not make loads and loads of money.

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And so it was in the beginning of kind of doing assistive technology implementation,

was...

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it was pretty safe to assume that they did not have familiarity with the kinds of tech

that we were using.

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But now that we can focus on, you know, tablet devices and smart home speakers that are

just mainstream, kind of off the shelf, the same ones that everyone else orders, people

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are like, yeah, my cousin has one of those or, I just got one of those for Christmas.

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And that makes a big difference that now it's not only financially accessible, but there

is a better knowledge infrastructure because more people have access to those tools now,

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which makes it so much easier for them to use.

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That is amazing.

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By the way, something just came to mind.

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Can you describe the differences you see in culture between the US and UK for for care

services?

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I'm sure there must be a difference.

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Yes, I'm sure that there is.

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I think I'm much more familiar with the UK system of supports.

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I'm not sure what the same terms, what the same like words are called here.

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So in the UK, they have they have kind of support levels all the way from independent

living where somebody has someone who just checks on them a certain number of times or

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hours per week or per day.

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And other than that, are kind of live in their own lives and managing their space all the

way kind of down to increasing

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levels of supports to people who have one or two care workers at a time and are living in

a place that looks kind of like a what we would call nursing care, but just somebody with

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higher needs has a higher support.

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So I think it's okay.

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And I think maybe it's a little bit more how the staff are structured.

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It's much easier for people to go through agencies.

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in the UK or residential places because it's easier to manage a staff team in one

building, which I think the US may have disaggregated a little bit better so that people

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are more in like group homes than in kind of clustered nursing care.

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I think some of that is just a function of the infrastructure in the UK.

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know, a lot of care homes are using donated estates and donated land or housing and

there's only so much.

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change that you can do for that keeps people in their communities.

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A lot of them are in very rural areas.

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So that is a big benefit in the US is that because there are no giant estates really being

used, people are more likely to be in a small home with a small staff that kind of rotates

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through and a couple of roommates rather than it being like a big facility.

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Thank you for that.

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you were also doing a post-doctoral fellowship at Georgia State University on disability

advocacy and leadership education.

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How does LEND's interdisciplinary models bring together professionals from medicine,

education, social work, therapy, and differ from silo professional training for, how does

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that differ from

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siloed professionals training the experience so far and what, what, is this important?

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So I first will say LEND has been with no exceptions the best experience of my whole life.

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It's been so amazing to be in a space.

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And I think that the difference in this interdisciplinary model is the people who are in

the room, the people who are coordinating and who arrange each cohort are so good at

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making sure that there are self-advocates in the room.

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audiologists and psychologists and parents and siblings and all of these different

professional educators, know, all of these different professionals who are circling around

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the disability experience and finding how they can be a strong voice for advocacy in

whatever space they're in.

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But they are in a room with disabled people and it changes the way you are talking about

disability because it removes that us versus them.

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kind of even again, like I said, most places would never ever articulate that there is an

us versus them.

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But if you're having conversations that disabled people aren't in about disabled people,

you are an us and them.

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And so I think it is a total game changer to have that exact combination of people in the

room.

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And every year it's different, right?

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Some years you've got a lot of audiology students and some years you've got a lot of

physical therapy students.

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And this year we had two psychiatrists.

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We have me, whatever I am, sociology researcher, behavior analyst.

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So it is an interesting group.

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You know, it's always, usually there is a behavior analyst and a couple of autistic people

who have some growing to do together because they're not feeling like they're always on

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the same page.

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And so I have the very lucky happenstance of actually relating to both those perspectives.

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So I get to have very different conversations, but

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it's in a room that they spend so much time right at the beginning of the cohort making it

so safe that you get to have conversations you would have never been bold enough to have

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with the people you're having them with, which is just, think everybody leaves that

program completely changed and completely ready to advocate differently and dare I say

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better, more effectively than they would have without that program.

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That is amazing.

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Okay, as we wrap up, think as we close, if you could snap your fingers and change one

thing about how society approaches accessibility technology, what would it be?

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I would magically change how everyone is thinking about

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fitting.

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I would move everyone's kind of language framework away from fixing to fitting because I

think that that gives people the freedom to stop focusing on the people and the tools and

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think much more broadly about what fitting looks like.

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What does inclusion actually look like when we want people to belong?

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What does that mean?

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And so I think rather than fixing an access problem, fixing

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a person's skill set, fixing a meeting format so that it works for more people.

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Think about fitting.

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Who fits here?

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What should we change so that more people fit here?

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And I think that takes the focus off of the people who aren't fitting into the space that

wasn't made fit.

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And I think that that's an important shift for people to make just in the way that you

think about things.

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Yeah, I really enjoyed that.

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And thank you, Julie.

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uh So that's a wrap.

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Thank you for being on my show.

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uh NeuroSec is about turning momentum to action, action, real stories, practical tools,

and honest conversations about neurodiversity, disability rights, inclusive workspaces,

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accessibility, and security.

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So if you want to be a guest or if you have a story that needs to be heard, send me a

message and let's make a difference together.

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And thank you for being on the show, Julie.

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And thank you for listening.

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And be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel.

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Thank you.

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Thank you so much.

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Thanks for having me.

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was fun.

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m