Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
229 results found in Research Methods.
- Sign Language Corpus (ASL Corpus, Signed Language Corpus)
- A structured collection of recorded signed-language performances — typically video, and increasingly motion-capture data — annotated by expert signers with time-stamped linguistic information such as …
- Signal Detection Theory (SDT)
- A statistical framework used to measure the accuracy of a system or person in distinguishing between the presence and absence of a target signal amid noise. In accessibility and assistive technology r…
- Simple Reaction Time (SRT, Reaction Time Test)
- A psychometric measure of the time it takes a person to respond to a single stimulus, such as pressing a button when a light appears. Simple Reaction Time is used in accessibility and usability resear…
- Single Case Experimental Design (SCED, Single Subject Design, N-of-1 Design)
- A research methodology in which individual participants serve as their own control, with repeated measurements taken during baseline and intervention phases to evaluate the effect of a treatment or in…
- Single-Case Study (Single-Subject Design, Single-Case Experimental Design, N-of-1 Study, ABA Design)
- A research methodology in which an individual participant serves as their own control, with systematic measurement of behavior across different conditions such as baseline and intervention phases. The…
- Single-Subject Case Study (Single-Case Design, N-of-1 Study, Single-Subject Research Design)
- A single-subject case study is a research methodology that focuses on detailed observation and analysis of one individual (or a small number of individuals) over time, rather than comparing group aver…
- Situated Play Design (SPD)
- Situated Play Design is a design approach developed by Altarriba Bertran and colleagues that treats play as something emergent from a specific social, physical, and cultural setting rather than someth…
- Small-n Experimental Design (Small-sample Design, Single-case Design)
- Small-n (or single-case) experimental design is a family of research methodologies aimed at drawing rigorous causal conclusions from very few — sometimes just one — participants. The approaches includ…
- Soma design (Somaesthetic design)
- A design approach rooted in somaesthetics that foregrounds the sensing, feeling, living body as both the subject and medium of design. Soma design attends to the full range of bodily experience — touc…
- Speculative Design (Design Fiction, Critical Design)
- A design approach that uses conceptual proposals and provocative artifacts to explore possible futures, challenge assumptions, and stimulate debate rather than solve immediate practical problems. In a…
- Speech Prosodics (Prosodic Features, Suprasegmental Features)
- Speech prosodics refers to the nonverbal acoustic features of speech that convey meaning beyond the words themselves, including pitch (fundamental frequency), rhythm, stress, intonation patterns, paus…
- Stemming (Word Stemming, Suffix Stripping)
- Stemming is a natural-language-processing technique that reduces inflected or derived words to their base or root form — 'running', 'runs', and 'ran' all map to the stem 'run'. The Porter stemmer (198…
- Stratified Sampling (Stratified Random Sampling)
- Stratified sampling is a statistical technique that divides a population into non-overlapping subgroups (strata) that share some characteristic, then draws a random sample from each stratum. In access…
- Support Network (Support Worker, Support Person, Circle of Support)
- The caregivers, family members, support workers, teachers, and peers who assist a person with a disability in daily life and in participating in research or design activities. In inclusive co-design w…
- Systematic Review (Systematic Literature Review)
- A systematic review is a rigorous, reproducible synthesis of research on a narrowly-defined question, using a pre-registered protocol, exhaustive database search, explicit inclusion and exclusion crit…
- Target Highlight Time (THT)
- A performance measure used in human-computer interaction research that captures the time elapsed between when a user positions a pointer over a target and when they initiate an action on that target, …
- Task Analysis (Hierarchical Task Analysis, HTA)
- A systematic method for breaking down complex activities into their component tasks, subtasks, and actions to understand how users accomplish goals when interacting with a system. In accessibility and…
- Taxonomy (Classification System, Classification Scheme)
- A structured classification system that organizes concepts, terms, or entities into hierarchical categories based on shared characteristics. In accessibility research and practice, taxonomies are used…
- Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)
- A theoretical framework originally developed by Fred Davis in 1989 that explains how users come to accept and use a technology. TAM posits that technology adoption depends on two primary factors: perc…
- Technology Biography (Technology Biographies)
- A qualitative research method consisting of structured interview and observation sessions focused on specific elements of a user's interaction with technological artifacts. Developed by Blythe and col…