Glossary

Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.

18 results found in Blind and Low Vision.

Assistive Drone (Assistive UAV, Assistive Quadcopter)
A small unmanned aerial vehicle configured to assist a person with a disability — most often a blind or low-vision user — with tasks such as locating objects, navigating unfamiliar environments, scann…
Chart Question Answering (Chart QA, ChartQA, Visual Question Answering for Charts)
The task of answering natural-language questions about a data visualization, typically a chart provided as an image or structured specification. A chart question answering system must identify the cha…
Depth Estimation (Monocular Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction)
The computer vision task of predicting the distance from the camera to each point in a scene, producing a depth map in which each pixel carries a distance value. Monocular depth estimation uses a sing…
Embodied Exploration
An approach to virtual environment interaction in which the user builds understanding of a space by physically walking, turning, reaching, and sweeping rather than by teleporting or using controller-b…
Mixed-Visual Ability (diverse visual abilities, mixed-visual-ability team)
Mixed-visual ability refers to teams or workplace settings that include members with a range of visual abilities, including sighted individuals, people with low vision, and people who are blind. The c…
Mobile Virtual Reality (Mobile VR, Smartphone VR)
Virtual reality systems delivered through a smartphone and consumer-grade accessories (wireless headphones, simple hand-held mounts) rather than a dedicated head-mounted display and PC rig. For access…
OrCam (OrCam MyEye, OrCam Read)
A family of wearable assistive devices made by OrCam Technologies that use a camera and on-device AI to read printed text aloud, identify faces and products, and recognize colors and banknotes for bli…
Pedestrian Navigation (Pedestrian Wayfinding, On-Foot Navigation)
Pedestrian navigation refers to wayfinding and route-following on foot in outdoor environments, including sidewalks, crosswalks, public transit access points, and shared streets. For blind and low vis…
Product Identification (Product Recognition)
The task of determining what a packaged or unpackaged product is from visual (or other sensory) input, at a level of detail useful to an end user: generic type (soup, cereal, shampoo), brand (Campbell…
Robotic Guide Dog (Robot Guide Dog, Quadruped Guide Robot)
A mobile robot — typically a quadruped platform — designed to provide navigation and obstacle-avoidance support for blind and low-vision users, filling a role analogous to that of a trained guide dog.…
Semantic Scene Graph (SSG, scene graph)
A semantic scene graph is a structured data representation of a 3D or 2D environment that encodes objects, their properties (such as position, size, color, and audio characteristics), and the spatial …
Social Wayfinding (Social Navigation Assistance)
Social wayfinding refers to the capacity to perceive and navigate the dynamics of a social scene, not just its physical layout. It covers identifying who is present, where they are oriented, whether t…
Spatial Reasoning
The cognitive process of understanding where objects are, how they are oriented, and how they relate to each other in three-dimensional space. Spatial reasoning is central to tasks like assembling pro…
Spatialization (Spatialisation, Audio Spatialization, 3D Audio Spatialization)
The process of rendering a sound so that it appears to originate from a specific location in three-dimensional space around the listener. Spatialization typically combines head-related transfer functi…
Tactile Authoring (Tactile Graphic Authoring, BLV Authoring)
The creation of tactile graphics — raised-line drawings, swell-paper images, or refreshable-display renderings — by or with blind and low-vision authors, rather than exclusively by sighted experts. Ta…
Vibro-Audio Map (VAM, Vibro-Audio Display)
A multimodal map representation for touchscreen devices that combines vibrotactile feedback with synchronised audio cues to convey spatial information non-visually. Users explore the map by dragging a…
Video-to-Haptics (Video to Haptics, V2H)
A class of techniques that automatically generate haptic feedback (typically vibrotactile or force cues) from visual content in video, so that viewers feel sensations synchronised with what they see. …
Vista Space (Vista)
In Montello's classification of psychological spaces, a Vista is a far-field space that can be visually apprehended from a single vantage point without appreciable locomotion - a horizon view, a city …