It really depends on the way someone’s autism effects their social skills. Not everyone has the capacity to learn these skills, Autism does create a skill cap for many people.
It’s also a question of involved effort. I was in a form of ABA therapy as a kid and I was capable of learning to identify sarcasm and read social cues, so I did.
But it doesn’t come naturally to me, it requires a level of concentration and conscious processing that I don’t hear non-autistic people discussing. It causes headaches and migraines and after a few days of work, using these skills every minute of the day, I’m exhausted and struggle with basic tasks at home. I don’t have these same issues with exhaustion or conscious processing when I’m with other autistic people (I work in disability programming, I coordinate/admin 3 days a week with mostly neurotypical people, and run programs 1 day a week with mostly neurodivergent people, and there’s a big difference on how much “effort” it takes to understand people in those two environments)
Not saying it’s not worth learning. If you can learn these skills they are incredibly important and at the bare minimum they will keep you safe.
But as a society we need to accept that for a small subset of people with disabilities, these skills are unachievable, and reasonable accommodations will still need to be made, and for a slightly larger subset, accommodations may still need to be made on occasion because while someone may have these skills, they might not have the cognitive capacity to employ these skills 100% of the time.
It really depends on the way someone’s autism effects their social skills. Not everyone has the capacity to learn these skills, Autism does create a skill cap for many people.
It’s also a question of involved effort. I was in a form of ABA therapy as a kid and I was capable of learning to identify sarcasm and read social cues, so I did.
But it doesn’t come naturally to me, it requires a level of concentration and conscious processing that I don’t hear non-autistic people discussing. It causes headaches and migraines and after a few days of work, using these skills every minute of the day, I’m exhausted and struggle with basic tasks at home. I don’t have these same issues with exhaustion or conscious processing when I’m with other autistic people (I work in disability programming, I coordinate/admin 3 days a week with mostly neurotypical people, and run programs 1 day a week with mostly neurodivergent people, and there’s a big difference on how much “effort” it takes to understand people in those two environments)
Not saying it’s not worth learning. If you can learn these skills they are incredibly important and at the bare minimum they will keep you safe.
But as a society we need to accept that for a small subset of people with disabilities, these skills are unachievable, and reasonable accommodations will still need to be made, and for a slightly larger subset, accommodations may still need to be made on occasion because while someone may have these skills, they might not have the cognitive capacity to employ these skills 100% of the time.