Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
37 results found in Accessibility Research.
- Academic Accessibility (Accessibility in academia, Scholarly accessibility)
- The degree to which the tools, publications, venues, and institutional practices of academic research and higher education are usable by disabled students, faculty, and researchers. Academic accessibi…
- Accessibility Commons (AC Repository, AC Metadata Repository)
- A shared metadata repository and schema proposed in 2008 by IBM, the University of Washington, Stony Brook University, and the University of Manchester to let accessibility-remediation research projec…
- Allocative Harm (Allocational Harm)
- A category of algorithmic harm in which an automated system disproportionately withholds opportunities, resources, or services from certain individuals or groups - often because those groups are under…
- 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…
- Bidirectional Learning
- A principle in community-based and participatory design research in which knowledge flows in both directions between researchers/designers and community members, rather than researchers extracting dat…
- Crip HCI
- An orientation within human-computer interaction that brings crip theory and crip technoscience into the methods, design practices, and evaluation frameworks of computing research. Rather than asking …
- 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…
- Human-Nature Interaction (HNI)
- A research area within human-computer interaction concerned with how people perceive, access, and engage with natural environments, and how technology can mediate that relationship. HNI draws on envir…
- Implementation Science
- The study of methods and strategies that promote the systematic uptake of research findings and evidence-based practices into routine clinical, educational, or service settings. Implementation science…
- In-Situ Deployment (In-Situ Study, Field Deployment Study)
- A research methodology in which a functional prototype or product is installed on participants' own devices and used in their everyday environment over days, weeks, or months, rather than in a control…
- Index of Difficulty (ID, Fitts ID)
- The Index of Difficulty (ID) is the central quantity in Fitts' law that captures how hard a rapid aimed pointing movement is, computed as log₂(A/W + 1) in the Shannon formulation, where A is the ampli…
- Information Foraging Theory (IFT)
- A theory proposed by Pirolli and Card describing how people seek information by adaptively optimising for maximum information gain with minimum effort, analogous to animal foraging. Key constructs inc…
- Infrastructuring for Access
- A design approach introduced by Wang and Marie (CHI 2026) that combines HCI's infrastructuring theory with Disability Studies and Repair Studies. Rather than focusing on removing barriers or accommoda…
- Interaction with Disabled Persons Scale (IDP Scale, IDP)
- A standardized 20-item attitudinal instrument developed by Gething and Wheeler (1992) and later validated by Forlin, Fogarty, and Caroll (1999), designed to measure both desirable and undesirable emot…
- Leadership of the Most Affected
- A core principle of disability-justice organising that positions people most directly affected by a problem — those with the most at stake and the most lived expertise — as the leaders of work aimed a…
- Meta-Research (Research on research, Metascience)
- The systematic study of research itself — the tools, workflows, norms, infrastructures, and institutional practices through which scholarly knowledge is produced, evaluated, and disseminated. Meta-res…
- Metadata Repository (Metadata Store, Metadata Registry)
- A server-side system that stores and serves descriptive data about other resources — in accessibility contexts, typically information about web pages or their elements that helps assistive technology …
- Mini-VLAT (Miniature VLAT)
- A 12-item short-form version of the Visualization Literacy Assessment Test developed by Pandey and Ottley that preserves reliability while reducing participant burden. Each chart type from the origina…
- Multimodal Natural Language Generation (Multimodal NLG)
- Natural language generation systems that produce output coordinated across more than one modality — typically combinations of text or speech with graphics, maps, animation, gesture, or tactile output.…
- Nature Engagement (Engagement with Nature)
- The active, lived practice of spending time in and interacting with natural environments - walking in parks, gardening, listening to birdsong, touching plants, sitting by water, and similar embodied e…