Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
88 results found in Accessibility Concepts.
- Customization (User Customization)
- Customization is the practice of allowing users to adapt a system's behaviour, output, or presentation to match their individual goals, preferences, and context. In accessibility, customization is ess…
- Data Structure
- A way of organizing and storing data in a computer so that it can be accessed and modified efficiently. Common introductory data structures include arrays, linked lists, stacks, queues, trees (such as…
- Deafness
- A hearing loss profound enough that a person cannot rely on hearing as the primary channel for language and environmental awareness, typically defined audiologically as a loss of 90 decibels or more i…
- Decision Confidence
- A reframing of accessibility as whether a user can judge product suitability, transaction risk, and information trustworthiness well enough to act independently — introduced by Ryskeldiev et al. (2026…
- Design Exclusion (Exclusion Audit, Technology Exclusion)
- The process by which certain users are prevented from effectively using a product or service due to mismatches between the design of the technology and their abilities, circumstances, or available res…
- Desire Paths (Desire lines)
- A term from urban design describing the unofficial trails that pedestrians wear into grass or dirt when built sidewalks do not meet their needs - the visible trace of an infrastructure users have impr…
- Dialogue Design (Interaction Dialogue, User Dialogue Design)
- Dialogue design in human-computer interaction refers to the structured planning of the conversational exchange between a user and a system, defining how input is accepted, how the system responds, and…
- Digital Citizenship
- Digital citizenship refers to the capacity to participate fully, safely and recognisably in online and digital public life - having roles, routines and voice in the platforms where shared culture and …
- Direct Speech Access (Speech-Enabling)
- An approach to providing speech output where applications generate spoken feedback directly from their semantic context, as opposed to the traditional screen-reading approach where an external program…
- Dual User Interface (Dual Interface, Concurrent Accessible Interface)
- An interface design approach in which two distinct, purpose-built user interfaces are provided simultaneously for different user groups — typically one visual interface for sighted users and one non-v…
- Embodied Knowledge (Embodied expertise, Lived knowledge)
- Knowledge that is grounded in bodily experience rather than externally observable behaviour or abstract rule - the kind of knowing a person who stutters has about the tension before a block, a blind p…
- End-User Programming (EUP, End-User Development, EUD)
- A design approach that enables people without formal programming training to create, modify, or combine software behaviors to suit their own needs. Typical end-user programming systems expose computat…
- Environmental Sound (Ambient Sound, Non-Speech Audio)
- Any auditory information in a person's surroundings that is not speech, including sounds from appliances, alarms, animals, doorbells, traffic, weather, and other environmental sources. For deaf and ha…
- Execution Gap (Gulf of Execution)
- From Don Norman's model of human-computer interaction, the distance between a user's goals and the physical actions required to achieve them using a given system. A system with a wide execution gap fo…
- Failure Mode (Accessibility failure mode)
- In accessibility evaluation, any hindrance caused by a product or web site that prevents a user with a disability from achieving a goal with the same effectiveness, efficiency or safety as a non-disab…
- Fragile Learning Continuity
- A framework proposed by Bhuiyan et al. (2026) to describe how accessibility in low-resource Deaf education depends not on any single feature — visibility, sign clarity, vocabulary, or connectivity — b…
- Human-Centered Computing (Human-Centred Computing, People-Centered Computing)
- Human-centered computing is an approach to technology design and development that places human needs, capabilities, and experiences at the center of the design process. It emphasizes understanding the…
- Inclusive Learning (Inclusive Education Design, Accessible Learning)
- An educational approach that ensures all learners, including those with disabilities, can fully participate in and benefit from learning activities and materials. Inclusive learning involves designing…
- Intermedia (Intermedia Representation)
- Intermedia refers to a framework for information representation that supports diverse, adaptable, and flexible presentation modes, allowing the same content to be accessed through multiple alternative…
- Latency (Delay, Lag, Response Time)
- The time delay between when an event occurs and when its accessible representation is delivered to the user. In real-time captioning, latency is the gap between spoken words and their appearance as te…