Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
52 results found in Accessibility Testing.
- Disability Simulation (Disability Simulator, Empathy Exercise)
- A method of accessibility evaluation where non-disabled people experience approximations of the barriers faced by people with disabilities when using technology or navigating environments. In web acce…
- Element Detection (UI Element Detection, Widget Detection, Object Detection)
- The task of automatically identifying the locations and types of user interface components (such as buttons, text fields, images, and checkboxes) from a screenshot using computer vision models. Elemen…
- Evaluation Reliability (Inter-rater Reliability, Evaluator Agreement)
- The extent to which independent accessibility evaluations of the same content produce consistent results. High reliability means that different evaluators using the same method will identify similar s…
- Evaluator Effect
- The evaluator effect refers to the phenomenon where different accessibility evaluators identify different sets of problems when assessing the same website, leading to variability in evaluation results…
- F-measure (F-score, F1 Score)
- A metric that combines correctness (precision) and sensitivity (recall) into a single balanced score, calculated as the harmonic mean of the two values. In accessibility evaluation research, the F-mea…
- Functiona11ity Error (Functionality Error, Functiona11ity)
- A term coined by Zhong et al. (2026) — a portmanteau of 'functionality' and 'a11y' (accessibility) — for an accessibility barrier that only manifests through interaction. The static state of the UI ap…
- Functional Web Accessibility Evaluator (FAE, Functional Accessibility Evaluator)
- A web accessibility testing tool developed by the University of Illinois that evaluates websites based on coding techniques and best practices rather than simply checking for the presence or absence o…
- In Situ Study (Field Study, In-the-Wild Study, Remote Study)
- An in situ study is a research method where participants are observed or data is collected in their natural environment rather than in a controlled laboratory setting. In accessibility research, in si…
- Input Logging (Keystroke Logging, Input Event Logging)
- The practice of recording detailed timestamped data about keyboard and mouse events — including key presses, releases, mouse movements, clicks, and button states — for analysis of user interaction pat…
- LLM Agent (Generative Agent, Task-Executing Agent)
- A software system built around a large language model that autonomously perceives state, plans actions, executes them against an environment (a web page, a mobile app, a shell, a UI), and reflects on …
- LLM-as-Judge (LLM as a Judge, Model-as-Judge)
- An evaluation methodology in which a large language model is prompted to assess the quality of some artifact — generated text, code, a UI, or a response from another model — according to a structured …
- Metamessage (Designer's Metamessage)
- In Semiotic Engineering theory, the overarching one-way message that a designer sends to users through the system's interface, communicating who the system is for, what it can do, how to use it, and w…
- OPTIMAL-EM (Optimised Evaluation Methodology)
- A web accessibility evaluation methodology proposed by Hambley, Yesilada, Vigo, and Harper to complement the W3C's WCAG-EM by providing a statistically grounded, complexity-driven method for selecting…
- PDF Form (PDF Fillable Form, Interactive PDF Form, AcroForm)
- A PDF document that contains interactive form fields — text boxes, checkboxes, radio buttons, signatures, dropdowns — that users can fill in and submit electronically, rather than a static PDF meant o…
- Pa11y
- An open-source automated accessibility testing tool that runs from the command line and in continuous-integration pipelines. Pa11y can drive either axe-core or HTML CodeSniffer as its underlying rule …
- Perceived Accessibility (Subjective Accessibility, Accessibility-in-Use)
- Perceived accessibility refers to the subjective quality by which users experience the accessibility of a website or application, as opposed to its objective compliance with accessibility standards. R…
- Proxy Feedback (Proxy User Testing, Surrogate Feedback)
- A user research method in which feedback on designs or prototypes is gathered from people who are close to the target users — such as carers, therapists, family members, or support workers — rather th…
- RAVEN (Rule-based Accessibility Validation Environment)
- An accessibility testing tool developed by IBM as a set of Eclipse IDE plug-ins for verifying the accessibility of graphical user interface applications. RAVEN uses aspect-oriented programming techniq…
- Representative Sampling (Representative Page Sampling)
- In web accessibility auditing, the practice of selecting a subset of pages from a website that statistically reflects the full site, so that evaluation findings can be generalised to pages not directl…
- SERPA (Streamlined Evaluation and Reporting Process for Accessibility)
- A programmer-centric methodology for conducting and reporting website accessibility evaluations, proposed by Law, Jacko, and Edwards in 2005. SERPA restructures the traditional accessibility evaluatio…