Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
13 results found in Auditory Accessibility.
- 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…
- Active Noise Cancellation (ANC, Active Noise Control)
- A technique that reduces unwanted ambient sound by using microphones to capture incoming noise and electronically generating an inverted (anti-phase) audio signal that destructively interferes with it…
- Audio Interference (Audio Conflict, Speech Conflict)
- Audio interference in a digital accessibility context is the overlap of two or more sound streams in a user's environment such that one masks another — most commonly, auto-playing media audio on a web…
- Background Noise (Ambient noise, Environmental noise)
- The sum of unwanted or competing sound in an environment — traffic, construction, conversation, HVAC systems, weather — that is present alongside a signal of interest. Background noise is characterize…
- Frequency Selectivity (Auditory Frequency Resolution, Critical Band Selectivity)
- Frequency selectivity is the auditory system's ability to separate closely-spaced frequencies into distinct perceptual streams — the reason a typical listener can follow one voice in a crowd, hear the…
- Listening Rate (Comprehension Speed, Listening Speed)
- The maximum speed at which an individual can accurately comprehend spoken or synthesized speech, typically measured as a normalized value or in words per minute. Research shows that experienced screen…
- Loudness Recruitment (Recruitment, Hyperacusis-like Recruitment)
- Loudness recruitment is a common consequence of sensorineural hearing loss in which the range between 'just audible' and 'uncomfortably loud' sounds is compressed — quiet sounds are harder to hear, bu…
- Semantic Hearing (Programmable Hearing, Intent-Aware Hearing)
- A research paradigm and class of systems that treat the user's auditory environment as something programmable: rather than uniformly amplifying or suppressing all sound, the wearable headphone or earb…
- Speech Rate (Speaking Rate, Articulation Rate)
- The speed at which speech is produced, typically measured in words per minute (WPM) or syllables per second. Normal conversational speech ranges from 120-180 WPM, while screen reader users often confi…
- Target Sound Extraction (Target Sound Separation, TSE)
- A machine-learning task in which a model isolates a specific target sound (or class of sounds) from a complex acoustic mixture, conditioned on some specification of the target - a text label, a refere…
- Time-compressed Speech (Accelerated Speech, Speed-altered Speech)
- Speech that has been digitally processed to play at a faster rate than it was originally recorded or synthesized, while preserving pitch. Unlike simply increasing playback speed (which raises pitch), …
- Voicemail (Voice Mail, Voice Messaging)
- Voicemail is a telecommunications service that records an audio message from a caller when the called party is unavailable, for later retrieval by the recipient. Accessibility considerations include: …
- Words Per Minute (WPM)
- A standard measure of speech or reading speed, representing the number of words produced or comprehended in one minute. Typical human speech occurs at 120-180 WPM, average reading speed is 200-250 WPM…