Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
88 results found in Accessibility Concepts.
- AI Ghostwriter Effect (Ghostwriter Effect)
- A phenomenon, first named by Draxler and colleagues, in which people who use AI writing assistants do not perceive themselves as authors or owners of the resulting text yet still publicly self-declare…
- AI for Accessibility (AI4A, Artificial Intelligence for Accessibility)
- An umbrella framing used by technology companies and researchers for applications of artificial intelligence — including computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, and generativ…
- Abstract Widget (Abstract Interaction Object)
- A user interface component defined by its semantic purpose and interaction behavior rather than its visual appearance. Abstract widgets specify what a user can do (select from options, enter text, tri…
- Accessibility Tax (Crip Tax, Disability Tax, Access Tax)
- The cumulative direct and indirect costs — financial, temporal, cognitive, and emotional — that disabled people pay to obtain the same access, outcomes, or opportunities available to non-disabled peer…
- Acoustic Accessibility (Sound Accessibility)
- An emerging framing of accessibility that considers a user's full acoustic environment - which sounds reach them, how loud, and in what mix - as a design surface to be adapted to individual sensory ne…
- Adapted Curriculum (Adapted Computer Curriculum, Modified Curriculum, Curriculum Adaptation)
- An adapted curriculum is an educational programme that has been modified to accommodate the learning needs, styles, and abilities of students with disabilities while maintaining the core learning obje…
- Adaptive Disclosure (On-Demand Disclosure, Progressive Disclosure for Accessibility)
- An interface design pattern in which supplementary accessibility content — summaries, keyphrase previews, navigation maps, alternative descriptions — is revealed only when the user requests it rather …
- Aesthetic Experience (Aesthetic Need, Aesthetic Accessibility)
- The emotional, sensory, and imaginative enjoyment people derive from environments, art, media, and everyday scenes - distinct from functional or task-oriented information. Aesthetic accessibility argu…
- Age-Related Accessibility (Aging and Accessibility, Older Adult Accessibility)
- The design considerations and accommodations needed to ensure digital technology is usable by older adults who experience age-related changes in vision, hearing, cognition, and motor control. Common c…
- Alternative Input Method (Alternative Input, Non-Standard Input)
- Any method of providing input to a computer or device that differs from the conventional keyboard, mouse, and touchscreen interfaces. Alternative input methods are essential for people with motor, sen…
- Appropriation
- In HCI and accessibility research, the process by which users adapt, repurpose, or extend a technology beyond its designers' original intent to fit their own practices and contexts. Appropriation is o…
- BVI (Blind and Visually Impaired, BLV, Blind and Low Vision)
- A widely used abbreviation in accessibility and HCI research denoting "blind and visually impaired" — the inclusive category that covers people who are totally blind, legally blind, or have any form o…
- Binary Search Tree (BST)
- A node-based binary tree data structure in which each node has at most two children and satisfies the BST property: every value in the left subtree is less than the node's value, and every value in th…
- Blind (Blindness)
- A visual impairment severe enough that a person cannot use vision as their primary means of perceiving information, typically defined legally in the United States as best-corrected visual acuity of 20…
- Brute-Force Fallback (Reset Strategy, Exhaustive Recovery)
- A workaround strategy employed by assistive technology users when standard interaction methods fail, involving systematically trying all available options or completely restarting a task from a known …
- Care Web (Care Web in Practice)
- A care web is a relational network of overlapping, often reciprocal support that sustains a disabled person's participation in everyday life, described by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in 'Care Wor…
- Checklist Accessibility (Checklist Conformism, Checklist Compliance)
- A critique of accessibility practice in which organisations treat accessibility as a set of discrete technical checks to be ticked off (alt text present, ARIA labels declared, contrast ratios met) rat…
- Child Agency
- Child agency is a child's capacity to initiate, shape, direct, and sustain activities - including play, conversation, and social interaction - rather than passively accepting adult or peer control. In…
- Co-Authorship (Co-authoring, AI Co-Authorship)
- In AI-mediated writing and communication, the shared production of text between a human user and an AI system, where neither party fully owns the resulting output. Co-authorship raises questions about…
- Conversational Management (Conversation Management, Interactional Management)
- The processes by which interlocutors jointly regulate the structure of a conversation - taking and ceding turns, pre-empting interruptions, shifting attention and topic, repairing misunderstandings, a…