Beyond the 9%: What Real Data About Event Comfort Reveals
Twelve data points that challenge how we currently design events
When I began this work through Neuromix, I knew that this was not ‘just a neurodivergent thing’. I knew that when the topic of ‘sensory issues’ comes up, the common knee-jerk reaction tend tends to jump to ‘autism’ as the main (if not only) issue.
It’s unfair to make autism a scapegoat - but data was needed to get to the heart of the matter. So we created a “Public Space Comfort Survey” that has received nearly 100 responses as of this writing.
Event venues and public spaces are designed for someone who doesn’t exist.
They’re built for a mythical “average” person who thrives in loud environments, tolerates bright lighting for hours, and finds hard plastic/steel seating perfectly comfortable.
Someone who never experiences sensory overload, never needs to step away from stimulation, and never considers sound levels when deciding whether to return to a venue.
In reality, 74% of respondents said sensory factors influence whether they return to a venue, regardless of neurotype. Additionally, among respondents who identified as neurotypical, 48% reported frequent sensory discomfort in public or event spaces.
To be fair, the industry has begun to acknowledge the issue, however the solutions and remedies that have been offered have tended to be single-sense, and incomplete solutions.
Quiet rooms. Designated “accessible” spaces. Accommodations that treat sensory needs as edge cases, rather than something that affects up to half of the population.
Because I don’t think the industry truly understands the true reality of the issue yet.
After collecting nearly 100 survey responses examining sensory experiences across neurotypes and demographics, clear trends have begun to emerge.
These responses span neurodivergent and neurotypical participants, multiple gender identities, and a wide range of event and public space experiences.
Two critical themes are already visible in the data.
Notably, over 80% of respondents reported leaving at least one event early in the past year due to sensory discomfort.
The gaps you’ll read about here explain why current accessibility solutions consistently fall short.
These don’t amount to minor oversights, they are more fundamental flaws in how we understand who experiences discomfort in public spaces and why.
Theme 1: The False Divide of Neurodivergent vs Neurotypical
Current accessibility frameworks operate on a binary assumption: neurodivergent people have sensory needs; but neurotypical people do not.
The data tells a different story.
Across all respondents in my ongoing research, the same sensory pain points consistently emerge as drivers of discomfort, early exit, and venue avoidance.
Sound was cited as a primary discomfort driver by 67% of respondents (across all genders and neurotypes). This directly ties back to my prior article: “The Loudness Wars: Why the Volume at Events Needs to Come Down”.
After sound, seating and physical comfort were cited at 54%, temperature at 51%, and lighting at 38%.
These patterns remain stable when the data is split by neurotype and gender.
Here’s what matters: neurodivergent respondents report higher overall frequency and compound strain, but neurotypical respondents identify the same environmental stressors.
The differences observed are primarily in tolerance and cumulative impact, not in which sensory factors matter. For example, neurodivergent respondents were 2.3× more likely to report cumulative sensory strain across three or more factors, but neurotypical respondents identified the same triggers.
Let that sink in.
Neurotypical and neurodivergent people are bothered by the same things. They just have different thresholds for how much they can tolerate before it becomes a problem that forces them to disengage and retreat.
Roughly two-thirds of all respondents report limited ability to remain in overstimulating environments beyond one to two hours.
Sound affects both groups.
Temperature affects both groups.
Uncomfortable seating affects both groups.
So the question is not whether neurotypical people have sensory needs (they definitely do), the question is why venues are designing spaces that consistently exceed comfortable thresholds for the majority of attendees, regardless of neurotype.
To re-iterate: I don’t think they truly know or understand. And it’s not entirely their fault.
Survey data shows that 62% of respondents (so far) are not comfortable raising an issue of discomfort to staff, meaning most sensory failures never register as feedback or complaints at all.
When an event space is designed with music at 95 decibels, fluorescent lighting at maximum brightness, and seating that prioritizes density over comfort, that’s not just failing neurodivergent attendees.
That’s failing most of the audience.
The current approach treats “accessibility” as a separate consideration. As something to add on after the primary design is complete. But this is backwards.
What we’re seeing in the data is that baseline environmental design is inadequate for human comfort across the board.
Theme 2: The Missing Demographics
But there’s an even bigger problem with the data that informs these accessibility solutions: it’s based on an incomplete population.
The diagnostic criteria and research studies that shape our understanding of neurodivergence have a significant gender problem:
[note: the above chart is not based on neuromix research, but on publicly available data]
Nine forms of neurodivergence show male-skewed diagnosis rates, while only four show female-skewed rates. This isn’t because men are inherently more likely to be neurodivergent, rather it’s because diagnostic criteria were developed based on how conditions present in boys and men.
This pattern echoes in my own dataset, where a significant portion of respondents identifying as women reported sensory strain despite lacking formal diagnoses.
As a result, large portions of the population are either diagnosed late or not diagnosed at all.
The consequences are systemic:
Girls with ADHD are diagnosed an average of three years later than boys with ADHD
Women with autism are consistently under-diagnosed because they don’t match criteria based on male presentation patterns
Conditions like dyslexia, dyspraxia, and auditory processing disorder show similar gender gaps in recognition
This distortion doesn’t just exist in clinical literature. It shows up in how people report their own experiences.
This chart highlights the most frequently cited sensory pain points by (self-reported gender) from a single survey item. While reporting frequency varies by gender, the same core stressors appear across all groups. Sound consistently ranks as the most commonly reported issue, followed by temperature and physical comfort.
Olfactory stress functions as a threshold trigger, not a background load. Scent doesn’t show up as often as sound or temperature because it isn’t always present. But when it is present, it can push people past their tolerance threshold, triggering them to disengage or leave early.
What differs is not the experience itself, but how it is described.
Men are less likely to explicitly label sensory environments as problematic. However, when asked behaviorally about time limits, avoidance, and likelihood of return, their responses largely align with women and non-binary respondents.
In other words, the same environments produce similar outcomes across genders, even if the language used to describe the experience differs. But systems should respond to outcomes, not labels.
Meanwhile, women and individuals ‘assigned female at birth/AFAB’ (who may now identify as non-binary or other identities) develop sophisticated masking strategies to compensate for environments that weren’t designed with their experiences in mind.
This social ‘masking’ carries a cognitive and emotional cost that compounds over time (which I call the “Mask Tax”). And because the masking is effective at hiding struggle, it reinforces the false perception that these individuals don’t need environmental modifications.
If the population data informing “neurodivergent needs” is systematically skewed toward male presentations and male diagnosis rates, then current accessibility solutions are built on incomplete information.
Venues attempting to accommodate neurodivergent guests are optimizing for a subset of a subset: the diagnosed, predominantly male portion of the neurodivergent population.
The system creates its own blind spots.
Among respondents who reported frequent masking, over 70% said they leave environments silently rather than request changes, reinforcing invisibility at the system level.
Under-diagnosis leads to invisibility in data.
Invisibility in data leads to exclusion from accessibility considerations.
Exclusion from accessibility considerations reinforces the need for masking.
And the cycle continues.
The implications for accessibility research and design are significant.
The Compounding Effect
What does this mean for accessibility research and design?
When you layer these two gaps together, you get accessibility solutions that serve almost no one effectively.
Incomplete gender data plus a false neurotypical/neurodivergent binary equals design standards based on the experiences of a narrow demographic slice that doesn’t represent the broader population actually using these spaces.
The “Mask Tax” (the cognitive and emotional toll of constantly hiding neurodivergent traits), and “Diagnosis Debt” (the compounding cost of late or missed diagnosis) are not personal failings or individual challenges. They’re predictable outcomes of designing systems with fundamentally incomplete data.
When venues create one “quiet room” for an event with 500 attendees, they’re not solving an accessibility problem. They’re applying a band-aid to a design problem while operating under the assumption that only a small percentage of attendees need sensory consideration.
The data shows this assumption is false.
In the survey, a significant portion of respondents reported leaving spaces early due to sensory discomfort while also indicating discomfort with raising issues to staff. Taken together, this suggests that many people exit rather than seek in-space remedies, such as relocating to quieter areas (ie a ‘quiet room’).
When event spaces default to 90+ decibel sound levels because “that’s what people expect at events,” they’re designing for a preference that doesn’t match what most attendees actually prefer or can comfortably tolerate for extended periods.
The current model treats environmental comfort as a niche concern but the data reveals it as a universal need with varying thresholds.
The Path Forward: Universal Design Over Accommodation
The solution is not ‘better accommodations’. It’s better baseline design.
Universal design principles start with the understanding that human variation is the norm, not the exception.
Instead of designing for an imaginary average person and then adding accommodations for “outliers,” universal design optimizes environments to work well across the full range of human sensory processing, physical needs, and cognitive styles.
For venues and event spaces, this means things like:
• Sound management as default practice.
• Lighting flexibility built into infrastructure.
• Physical comfort as a design priority.
• Transparency as an accessibility tool.
In this dataset, 76% of respondents report being more likely to return to or recommend venues that demonstrate sensory awareness — even in the absence of formal accommodations.
These aren’t accommodations, they’re evidence-based design standards that serve the actual population of people using these spaces.
My ongoing research is building the complete dataset needed to support this shift by collecting sensory experience data across neurotypes, genders, and demographics.
This will help create a comprehensive picture of what human comfort actually requires in shared spaces.
Not what’s traditional for events and not what we assume people can tolerate - what actually works.
Redesigning From Complete Data
The conversation about accessibility has been framed as “us versus them” for too long.
Neurodivergent versus neurotypical.
Disabled versus able-bodied.
People with needs versus people without them.
The data reveals that we’re all experiencing discomfort in poorly designed environments.
The difference is in how much we can tolerate, how long we can tolerate it, and whether we have the option to mask our discomfort or if we must leave when it becomes unbearable.
This is how we move towards accurate design based on complete data about actual human needs.
When we include the experiences of women and AFAB individuals who’ve been systematically excluded from diagnostic criteria, when we measure the sensory experiences of neurotypical people alongside neurodivergent people we get a clearer and true picture of the sensory comfort landscape.
Then we stop designing for assumptions or imaginary averages and we create spaces that genuinely serve everyone better.
Across the dataset, only 9% of respondents reported being consistently comfortable in event environments as they currently exist.
It’s not about charity or ‘token inclusion’, we’re just finally designing with accurate information about who actually uses these spaces and what they actually need.
That’s what good design is - and that’s what lies beyond quiet rooms.
This research is ongoing. If you’d like to contribute to building a more complete dataset on sensory experiences in public spaces, you can participate in the survey and add your experience.
Venues and event organizers interested in implementing evidence-based environmental design can reach out at info@neuromixconsulting.com, read our whitepaper, or book a call.
Lacey Artemis (she/they) is a neurodivergent researcher, speaker, and consultant focused on systems-level sensory inclusion and design. She is the founder of Neuromix Consulting, where her applied research and advisory work supports more comfortable, accessible public spaces.
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