Bac ES with honors in his pocket, Bryane, 21, validated in due time a computer DUT at the University of Toulouse-III. And, in September, after obtaining his professional degree in computer graphics, “It will be a master’s degree in a major animation film school! », he says, enthusiastic and confident in the future. Bryane is a student like any other… except that he was diagnosed at the age of 11 with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a term that covers all forms of autism, his being “fairly light”.
In his personal life as in the courses he multiplies, this disorder often passes for “great shyness”. Bryane says he has to make a disproportionate effort to ” look in the eyes ” his interlocutors, having trouble “to reach out to others”, to deal with the unexpected. But, above all, like many autistic people, to grasp in conversations the implicit, the second degree and the tacit social “codes”. In training as in the workplace, he needs to receive very clear instructions, preferably in writing, “to sort out the information, not get lost in the details and be less slow”. So many difficulties that would perhaps have been insurmountable without the help of the Aspie-Friendly device (“aspie” being a diminutive to qualify a person with Asperger’s).
Launched in 2018, the project Building an Aspie-Friendly University is in line with the report by the philosopher – and autistic – Josef Schovanec, published in 2017, which notably called for “to facilitate the professional inclusion of people with autism”, with an estimated 75% to 95% unemployed. This system plans to facilitate their integration into higher education which is still not very open to them, despite the improvement in their schooling since the 2005 law on the inclusion in school of students with disabilities.
Educational facilities
To date, twenty-five universities are participating in the project for some 500 autistic students supported, out of the few thousand officially present in these establishments, according to the statistics of the Ministry of Higher Education. These numbers are growing every year. But they remain a “straw” compared to the 700,000 French people with autistic disorders, according to National Institute of Health and Medical Research. At least half of them, who have long been referred to as “high-functioning autism” or “Asperger’s”, have no intellectual disability or language delay, but experience difficulties in communication and social interaction.
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