Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
899 results found in Assistive Technology.
- Currency Accessibility (Accessible Currency, Banknote Accessibility)
- The design of physical money — coins and banknotes — so that people with visual impairments or other disabilities can independently identify and use different denominations. Many countries produce ban…
- Cursor Assistance (Pointer Assistance, Mouse Assistance)
- Software techniques that modify cursor behavior to make pointing and clicking easier for users with motor impairments. Cursor assistance encompasses a range of approaches including enlarging the effec…
- Cursor Freeze (Pointer Freeze, Steady Clicks)
- An assistive technology technique that locks the cursor position in place during mouse button clicks, preventing the cursor from moving between the press and release of the button. This addresses a co…
- Cyber Crumb (Digital Crumb, Electronic Breadcrumb)
- A concept in accessible wayfinding where tiny, inexpensive solar-powered digital chips are placed along building walkways like a trail of breadcrumbs, storing location-specific information that can be…
- CyberGlove (CyberGlove II)
- A wearable motion-capture device in the form of a lightweight, elastic glove instrumented with bend sensors that measure the angles of finger joints during hand movement. CyberGloves are widely used i…
- DALL-E (DALL-E 2, DALL-E 3, DALLE)
- A family of text-to-image generative AI models developed by OpenAI that produces images from natural-language prompts. DALL-E models are widely used by content creators, including people with disabili…
- DECTalk
- A text-to-speech synthesis system originally developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1980s, using rule-based formant synthesis to generate speech from text input. DECTalk offered several pre…
- DIY Accessibility (Do-It-Yourself Accessibility, Grassroots Accessibility)
- An approach in which disabled people, their families, or proximate makers design and fabricate their own accessible artefacts—assistive tools, tactile labels, adapted clothing, switch-accessible toys—…
- DIY assistive technology (DIY-AT, Maker assistive technology, Open-source AT)
- Assistive devices and tools created or customised by end users, volunteers, or makers using accessible fabrication methods such as 3D printing, laser cutting, and off-the-shelf components. DIY-AT offe…
- DTMF (Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency, Touch-Tone)
- DTMF (Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency) is the signaling system used when pressing keys on a telephone keypad, where each key press generates a unique combination of two audio frequencies. In accessibility c…
- Data Minimization
- A privacy principle requiring that organizations collect, process, and retain only the minimum amount of personal data necessary to accomplish a specific purpose. For assistive technology users, data …
- Data Protection (Data Privacy)
- The practices, policies, and legal frameworks governing how personal information is collected, stored, processed, and shared by organizations. For assistive technology companies, data protection is es…
- Data sonification (Auditory graph, Audio chart)
- The representation of data values through non-speech audio, typically by mapping numerical values to auditory parameters such as pitch, volume, duration, or timbre. Data sonification makes charts and …
- Data-based Synthesis (Corpus-based Synthesis, Unit Selection Synthesis)
- A speech synthesis technique that generates speech by selecting and concatenating segments from a large database of prerecorded human speech, rather than using rules to generate acoustic waveforms fro…
- Dead Time (Wait Time, Idle Time)
- In scanning-based assistive technology interfaces, the period during which a user must passively wait before they can make their next input action. In row-column scanning, dead time occurs while waiti…
- Debounce (Debounce Filter, Key Debounce, Bounce Key Filter)
- A keyboard accessibility feature that filters out unintended extra keypresses caused by tremor or imprecise motor control. When enabled, the system ignores rapid successive activations of the same key…
- Decision Delay (Cognitive Delay, Selection Delay)
- The time a user spends deciding whether to accept or reject a suggestion from a predictive system, such as a word prediction list on an assistive technology device or keyboard. Decision delay is a cog…
- Decision-Theoretic Planning (Decision-Theoretic Approach)
- A computational approach to planning that uses mathematical models of decision-making under uncertainty, most commonly Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), to select optimal actions based on the current …
- Deconvolution
- A computational process that reverses the blurring effects of convolution in an optical or imaging system. In the context of visual accessibility, deconvolution is used to pre-process images displayed…
- Defluffing (Content Defluffing, Clutter Removal)
- The process of removing non-essential visual elements from a web page — such as banners, advertisements, decorative images, and sidebar content — to expose the core information content more directly t…