Qualitative Dataset: Neuroinclusive Accessibility Needs in Digital Citizen Science as Perceived by Neurodivergent Participants, Derived from the 2025 Neuro(Minorities)Science Ideation Session

Citizen science involves the active participation of members of the public in scientific research, with participants and professional scientists working together to generate new knowledge for both science and society. Digital citizen science is conducted via online platforms, enabling remote participation, collaboration, and data sharing. A yet unpublished large-scale study, Zooniverse Participatory Research Platform as a Neuro-Shared Online Space: A User Survey (2024), conducted on Zooniverse, the world’s largest people-powered research platform, demonstrated that a substantial number of neurodivergent individuals contribute to digital citizen science (Apreleva et al., 2026a, in preparation). Despite this, and although digital citizen science platforms commonly follow internationally recognised digital accessibility standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, the perspectives of neurodivergent participants have rarely been treated as a distinct design lens. Neuro(Minorities)Science is an international working group of 89 adult neurodivergent citizen scientists and allies who collaborated in 2025 to develop actionable, neurodiversity-informed accessibility guidelines for digital citizen science. The project received ethical approval from the Central University Research Ethics Committee at the University of Oxford (R94294/RE001). During the initial phase of the collaboration, an ideation session was conducted in which all group participants were invited to provide a brief response to the question: “What accessibility features must citizen science projects and platforms have to enable neurodivergent people to participate more actively and more comfortably in online citizen science?” Anonymised responses were compiled into a dataset and pre-screened by the research lead to remove personal identifiers, as well as irrelevant or offensive content. This study was funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 101058677, as part of the IMPETUS project accelerator 2025 (https://impetus4cs.eu).