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Your friendly guide to the world of neurodiversity. Explore terms, understand concepts, and join the community.
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Featured Terms
AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication)
Communication tools and strategies that support or replace speech—from picture cards and gestures to text-to-speech apps and eye-tracking computers. Used by people who find speaking difficult, exhausting, unreliable, or impossible, whether always or sometimes.
Accommodations
Changes to environment, tools, timing, or expectations that remove barriers so people can participate equally. Not special treatment or lowered standards—just different paths to the same destination.
ADHD Tax
The extra costs in money, time, and energy that people with ADHD pay because of executive function challenges in a world designed for neurotypical brains.
ADOS
Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule—a standardized assessment tool used to diagnose autism. A clinician observes you doing specific tasks and scores your responses against neurotypical expectations, often missing masked presentations, cultural differences, and adult adaptations.
Alexithymia
The inability to identify and describe your own emotions. You feel things intensely but can't name them—like having a complex emotional storm inside but only being able to say "I feel bad." Affects 50-85% of autistic people.
Allistic
A person who is not autistic. Created by the autistic community to name the specific neurology of non-autistic people, rather than treating it as a default "normal."
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