Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
17 results found in Media Accessibility.
- Chroma Key (Green Screen, Blue Screen, Chroma Keying)
- A video-post-production technique in which a solid, uniformly coloured background (often green or blue) is replaced with another image, video, or transparency using colour-matching software. In access…
- Educational Video (Instructional Video, Video Lecture)
- Video content created to teach - including talking-head lectures, screencasts, animations, hand-drawn (Khan-style) explanations, recorded classroom sessions, programming/coding demonstrations, intervi…
- Interpretive Alt Text
- Alt text that goes beyond objective, functional description to convey interpretive dimensions of an image such as mood, symbolism, narrative, and aesthetic effect. It is most relevant for images where…
- Mimetic Language (Sound Symbolism, Phonomimes, Ideophones)
- Words or vocalizations whose sounds imitate or evoke the sensory qualities of what they describe, such as the rustle of leaves, the thud of a drum, or the hiss of escaping air. Mimetic language sits a…
- Non-diegetic Sound (Non-diegetic Audio, Extradiegetic Sound)
- Sound in film, television, or games that does not originate from any source within the story world and cannot be heard by the characters - for example, orchestral score, voice-over narration, or added…
- Object-Based Audio (OBA, Object-Based Broadcasting)
- An audio production and delivery paradigm in which speech, music, effects, and ambience are transmitted as discrete objects with metadata describing their role and relationships, rather than as a sing…
- Participatory Captioning
- A framework proposed by Nguyen et al. (2026) that characterises social media video captioning as a collaborative, community-sustained infrastructure co-produced by viewers, creators, and platforms — r…
- Playhead (Play Head, Cursor Position)
- The visual indicator on a video or audio timeline that shows the current playback position, typically a vertical line or triangle marker that moves in time with the media. Playheads are a core primiti…
- Podcast (Podcasting)
- An episodic, on-demand audio programme distributed over the internet, typically via RSS or proprietary platforms such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and BBC Sounds. Podcasts are a dominant form of long-f…
- 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…
- Scrubbing (Video Scrubbing, Timeline Scrubbing)
- The interaction of dragging a playhead across a video or audio timeline to preview content at arbitrary positions, typically with real-time visual or audio feedback. Scrubbing is ubiquitous in video e…
- Social Media Video Captions (SMVC)
- An umbrella term for the textual or symbolic elements — platform-generated captions, creator-edited captions, user-generated captions, and non-speech information such as sound effects, music cues, or …
- Sound Design (Audio Design)
- The craft of creating, selecting, and arranging audio elements - dialogue, music, ambient sound, foley, and effects - to shape the experience of a film, game, broadcast, or interactive product. For ac…
- Speaker Diarisation (Speaker Diarization, Speaker Segmentation)
- The automatic process of segmenting an audio recording by speaker identity — answering "who spoke when" — and labelling each segment. A critical pre-requisite for accessible transcripts of multi-voice…
- Subtitle (Subtitles, Open captions (video), Movie subtitles)
- On-screen text that reproduces the spoken dialogue of a video, most commonly rendered in a "movie subtitle" style (white text with a black outline, one or two lines at the bottom of the frame). Subtit…
- Talking-Head Video (Talking Head)
- A common educational video format in which a presenter speaks directly to the camera, typically filling the frame, with no or few accompanying visuals. For d/Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing learners, talking…
- YouDescribe
- A free web platform operated by the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute that enables volunteers to crowdsource audio descriptions for YouTube videos. Viewers can request a video be described and s…