Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
221 results found in Cognitive Accessibility.
- Personal Data Externalization (Data Externalization)
- The process of representing internal experiences — thoughts, emotions, behaviours, bodily states — in some external medium such as a drawing, written word list, spreadsheet, physical artefact, or trac…
- Personalized Learning (Adaptive Learning, Individualized Instruction, Differentiated Instruction)
- Personalized learning is an educational approach that tailors content, pace, and delivery method to each learner's individual needs, preferences, and abilities. In accessibility contexts, personalizat…
- Phonological Processing (Phonological Awareness, Phonemic Awareness)
- The ability to recognize and manipulate the sound structures of language, including identifying individual phonemes, blending sounds together, and segmenting words into their component sounds. Phonolo…
- Picture Prompting (Visual prompting, Pictorial instruction)
- An instructional strategy that uses photographs or illustrations to depict how to complete each step of a task, providing visual guidance for people with developmental or intellectual disabilities. Pi…
- PrEmo (Product Emotion Measurement Instrument)
- A non-verbal self-report tool for measuring emotional responses, developed by Pieter Desmet. PrEmo presents users with 14 cartoon-like icons representing seven positive emotions (joy, admiration, prid…
- Proactive Prompt (Proactive Cue)
- In voice-interface and conversational-agent design, a system-initiated utterance or visual cue that surfaces a suggestion, reminder, or next step without the user first asking. Examples include sugges…
- Progress Bar (Progress Indicator)
- A UI element that visually communicates the proportion of a task, process, or timeline that has been completed. In media players it indicates playback position; in forms and wizards it signals complet…
- Prompting System (Prompting Device, Task Prompting Technology)
- An assistive technology that provides stepwise guidance through text, images, audio, or video instructions to help individuals complete multi-step tasks such as cooking, personal hygiene, or workplace…
- Psycholinguistics
- The scientific study of the cognitive and neural processes that underlie the production, comprehension, and acquisition of language. Psycholinguistic research measures phenomena such as reading and si…
- Read-Along (Read Along, Synchronised Highlighting, Karaoke-style Highlighting)
- An accessibility pattern in which on-screen text is highlighted word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase in synchronisation with spoken audio. Used in children's reading apps, language-learning tools, accessi…
- Readability formula (readability metric, readability index, readability measure)
- A mathematical formula that estimates the difficulty of reading a text, typically based on features like sentence length, word length, syllable count, or vocabulary frequency. Common formulas include …
- Reading Comprehension (Text Comprehension)
- The ability to understand, interpret, and derive meaning from written text. Reading comprehension involves multiple cognitive processes including decoding words, activating background knowledge, makin…
- Reading Level (Grade Level, Reading Grade Level)
- An estimate of the education or skill level a reader needs to understand a text, usually expressed as a U.S. school grade (e.g., grade 4) or an equivalent band. Reading level is the target output of m…
- Redundancy Principle
- A principle from the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning stating that people learn better from graphics and narration than from graphics, narration, and on-screen text presenting the same words, b…
- Rejection Sensitivity (Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, RSD)
- An intense emotional response to perceived or actual rejection, criticism, or failure that is commonly experienced by neurodivergent individuals, particularly those with ADHD and autism. Rejection sen…
- Repair Mechanism (Conversational Repair)
- In conversational interface design, a feature that helps the user and the system recover from misrecognition, ambiguity, or misunderstanding — for example, clarification prompts ("Did you mean the [X]…
- Repetitive Questioning (Perseverative Questioning)
- A behavioural symptom of dementia, particularly Alzheimer's disease, in which a person repeatedly asks the same question over and over, often within short time intervals. Repetitive questioning can st…
- SMOG (SMOG Index, SMOG Grade, Simple Measure of Gobbledygook)
- A readability formula developed by G. Harry McLaughlin in 1969 that estimates the years of education needed to understand a text, based on the number of polysyllabic words (three or more syllables) in…
- Safety Check-in (Wellness Check-in, Check-in Call)
- A safety check-in is a brief remote-communication exchange — most often a phone call, text, or app-based 'ping' — whose primary purpose is to confirm the safety and wellbeing of a person at a distance…
- Satisficing
- A decision-making strategy where users select the first option that appears "good enough" rather than evaluating all possibilities to find the optimal choice. Coined by Herbert Simon, satisficing is c…