Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
35 results found in AI and accessibility.
- Local-First Software (Local-First)
- A software design philosophy, articulated by Kleppmann and colleagues in 2019, in which applications keep the user's primary data on local devices and treat cloud services as optional synchronization …
- Mixture of Experts (MoE)
- Mixture of experts is a neural network architecture that routes each input through a small subset of specialist subnetworks ('experts') rather than activating the whole model. A gating network decides…
- Open-Vocabulary Detection (Open-Vocabulary Object Detection, OVD)
- A class of computer vision object detection models that accept arbitrary text queries at inference time rather than being restricted to a fixed set of pre-trained classes. Instead of only recognizing,…
- Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT, Lightweight Fine-Tuning)
- Parameter-efficient fine-tuning is a family of techniques (LoRA, adapters, prefix tuning, prompt tuning) that adapt a large pretrained model to a new task or domain by updating only a small fraction o…
- Reassurance Robot
- A term coined by Grace Barkhuff (CHI 2026) to describe generative AI systems — such as ChatGPT — that, by default, provide reassurance, confession-hearing, and decision-making on demand, thereby accom…
- Semantic Hearing (Programmable Hearing, Intent-Aware Hearing)
- A research paradigm and class of systems that treat the user's auditory environment as something programmable: rather than uniformly amplifying or suppressing all sound, the wearable headphone or earb…
- Small Language Model (SLM)
- A language model, typically ranging from tens of millions to a few billion parameters, designed to run on consumer or edge devices rather than in centralized cloud data centers. Small language models …
- Symbiotic Learning
- Symbiotic Learning is a conceptual framing introduced by Jiang et al. (CHI 2026) describing a mode of mixed-ability family learning in which parents and children mutually enable each other's participa…
- Target Sound Extraction (Target Sound Separation, TSE)
- A machine-learning task in which a model isolates a specific target sound (or class of sounds) from a complex acoustic mixture, conditioned on some specification of the target - a text label, a refere…
- Text-to-Sound (Text-to-Audio, TTA, Sound Generation from Text)
- A class of generative AI models that synthesize non-speech audio - sound effects, ambient environments, foley, or short music clips - from a natural-language description such as 'a door creaking shut'…
- Trust in Automation (Automation trust, TiA)
- A human factors construct describing the extent to which a person believes an automated system — a car, aircraft, medical device, AI assistant, or robot — will perform reliably and behave in their int…
- VQA (Visual Question Answering)
- VQA (Visual Question Answering) is an AI task in which a system answers natural-language questions about the content of an image. In assistive contexts, VQA systems such as Be My AI, Seeing AI, and Ai…
- Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN)
- Vision-and-language navigation is a task setup in which an agent follows natural-language instructions to move through a visual environment, grounding words like 'turn left at the blue sofa' onto what…
- Visualization Question Answering (Chart QA, Visualization QA, VisQA)
- A class of interactive systems that let users ask natural-language questions about a data visualization — a chart, graph, or map — and receive direct textual or spoken answers rather than having to in…
- Wav2Vec (Wav2Vec2, Wav2Vec 2.0)
- A family of self-supervised speech representation models from Meta AI that learn rich acoustic embeddings directly from raw waveform audio without requiring transcribed training data. Wav2Vec 2.0, int…