Online events are now common which can help some autistic people, but video chat may be challenging for some. An alternative is to have online meetings mainly or exclusively in text. On this page, Karen Leneh Buckle shares her advice and experience for running text chat meetings.
Benefits for autistic participants
- Less visual clutter e.g. many moving faces.
- Ability to re-read comments that may have been missed, forgotten, or misunderstood.
- Time to think, compose a reply, and express thoughts.
- Less reliance on non-verbal signals. It is easier to focus on the content and avoid errors of ‘reading between the lines’. Text also avoids problems with timing/interrupting because anyone can type their contribution whenever they want and not worry about finding the right gap
Benefits for researchers
- Text is far more tolerant of technical issues. Where video and voice become incomprehensible with glitching, freezing and ‘robot voice’ when signal is poor, text groups can be accessed with very limited and unreliable technology.
- An error free transcript is created as you go, without time consuming or expensive transcription. Such logs are useful not only for research data analysis, but also for writing minutes of meetings or preparing notes or articles.
Potential difficulties with text
- Some people may have difficulty putting their thoughts into writing due to specific learning disabilities or language impairments. There is also an advantage for those who can type quickly. However, these are is similar to the advantages fluent speakers have in typical conversations.
- Typing is much slower than speaking, so you need to give more time for each session, and there are lulls in the conversation when one has to wait for others to type. This can give a useful breather, but can be particularly challenging for those who have difficulty suppressing impulses.
Having text alongside a voice or video conversation loses many of the advantages, because the timing is dictated by the voice conversation and it still requires processing auditory and visual information simultaneously. However, any text communication would be an improvement over none. For my research, I chose to have separate face to face and text groups.
Choosing a platform
1. Check your chosen platform for visual clutter such as animations and colour.
I have used plain, simple Internet Relay Chat (IRC) for meetings for years, but went for Skype for my focus groups for better security and accessibility. Before we started, someone innocently posted an emoji. What appeared was an enormous moving smiley face that consumed half the screen. The rest of us couldn’t get our eyes off it well enough to concentrate until it had scrolled off due to additional text. Such monstrosities were immediately banned.
2. Make it easy for participants to find you.
Participants may be more willing to use familiar, popular software. Platforms that are designed for video or photos may hide their text capability. It is easier to get participants to a chat that you can invite them directly to your meeting.
3. Consider not just data security, but privacy and anonymity.
Consider how much control you want over who enters the conversation and who can talk at one time. A general rule of technology applies: more control requires higher time investment and technical competence.
Some platforms will offer an easy-to-use interface, but you also need to consider whether data can be encrypted and whether participants will need to share information with the whole group e.g. phone numbers or email addresses.
4. Obtaining transcripts
Ready-made transcripts are one of the big advantages of text meetings. I thought it would just be a matter of copying and pasting the text, but on some platforms you have to select each individual message and then copy them all to a file.
Running a meeting
How a meeting is run depends on the purpose of your meeting and how much discussion you want.
Prepare
Have a clear agenda or questions and send in advance to participants. With my last focus group, having the questions in advance helped participants stay on topic and not answer things I hadn’t asked yet. Consider your procedure and rules and have a backup plan. Test-run the whole system, all the way through to obtaining the transcript or log.
Controlling the rate of the discussion
This is likely to be your biggest challenge. You may have to be particularly firm to get heard.
Reduce the amount of unnecessary text by encouraging use of ‘reactions’ (e.g. ‘like’ symbols) to agree with others, if available. Don’t ask questions you don’t need to e.g. ‘Is everyone here’? The text will still be there for anyone who falls behind.
Have a procedure for handling responses to questions or discussion points. One of the advantages of text chat is that it doesn’t matter if everyone answers at once, however, that can lead to an onslaught of text. Calling on one person at a time may make it difficult for some autistic people to respond - or withhold a response.
Have a method to get everyone to stop and wait while someone types what they want to say. What we do is to type ‘wait’ and then we don’t go on until they’ve typed whatever they have to say. However, with one of my groups this had no effect at all. Perhaps a friendly stop sign image may have worked better. Find out if there is a way to forcibly stop one person or everyone from sending messages to the group.
Finishing
When wrapping up a question, allow ‘one more thing’. Also allow them to follow up by email. This serves two purposes. 1. They are less likely to feel very pressured to ‘get it all out’. 2. They have a way to get rid of what can be obsessive thoughts that occur after the meeting.
Other tips
If your meeting lasts more than an hour, take a break, even if it’s inconvenient. Be prepared for exhaustion. Chairing a text meeting can be very intensive, but worthwhile when you know that more perspectives are being included.