Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
229 results found in Research Methods.
- Infrastructuring
- A theoretical lens from HCI, CSCW, and participatory design (developed from the work of Susan Leigh Star, Karen Ruhleder, Volkmar Pipek, and Volker Wulf) that treats infrastructure not as a finished a…
- Input Logging (Keystroke Logging, Input Event Logging)
- The practice of recording detailed timestamped data about keyboard and mouse events — including key presses, releases, mouse movements, clicks, and button states — for analysis of user interaction pat…
- Inter-Annotator Agreement (IAA, Inter-rater agreement, Inter-coder agreement)
- A statistical measure of how consistently two or more human annotators assign the same label to the same data item, widely used in NLP, computer vision, and AI dataset construction as a proxy for labe…
- Interaction Analysis
- A qualitative research method for studying knowledge and action in interaction with people, objects, and environments — typically through close observation of video or screen recordings, annotating vi…
- Interaction with Disabled Persons Scale (IDP Scale, IDP)
- A standardized 20-item attitudinal instrument developed by Gething and Wheeler (1992) and later validated by Forlin, Fogarty, and Caroll (1999), designed to measure both desirable and undesirable emot…
- Intergroup Contact Theory (ICT, Contact Hypothesis)
- A social-psychology theory, originating with Gordon Allport's 1954 contact hypothesis and elaborated by Pettigrew, Tropp, and others, which holds that positive, meaningful interaction between members …
- Internal Reliability (Internal Consistency)
- A psychometric property that measures whether all items in a questionnaire or instrument contribute consistently to the overall score. It is commonly assessed using Cronbach's alpha, where values of 0…
- Internet Archive (Wayback Machine, Web Archive)
- A non-profit digital library founded in 1996 that archives web pages, books, audio, video, and software for free public access. Its Wayback Machine service stores historical snapshots of websites, all…
- Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI)
- A widely used multidimensional self-report measure of empathy developed by Mark H. Davis in 1980. The instrument contains four seven-item subscales: perspective taking (the tendency to adopt another's…
- Kinesiology (Human kinetics, Movement science)
- The scientific study of human body movement, encompassing biomechanics, anatomy, physiology, psychology, and neuroscience as they relate to physical activity. In accessibility contexts, kinesiology pr…
- Krippendorff's Alpha (Krippendorff Alpha, Kalpha)
- A statistical measure of inter-rater agreement used to assess how consistently two or more coders classify the same qualitative data. Developed by Klaus Krippendorff, the metric handles any number of …
- Landmark Detection (Acoustic Landmark Detection, Stevens Landmark Theory)
- Landmark detection is a speech analysis method based on Kenneth Stevens' acoustic model of speech production, which identifies perceptually significant points in the acoustic signal where listeners ex…
- Librosa
- An open-source Python library for audio and music signal analysis, widely used in music-information retrieval and accessibility research to extract low-level acoustic features such as tempo, RMS energ…
- Low-Fidelity Prototype (Low-Fi Prototype, Lo-Fi Prototype, Paper Prototype)
- A rough, inexpensive representation of a design - typically paper sketches, cardboard models, or wireframes - used early in the design process to explore concepts without investing in polished artefac…
- Lubben Social Network Scale (LSNS, LSNS-6)
- A validated screening instrument used to assess social isolation risk in older adults by measuring the size and closeness of their social networks. The abbreviated LSNS-6 version contains six items co…
- Matching Person and Technology (MPT Model)
- A framework for understanding assistive technology adoption that considers the match between a person's characteristics (preferences, needs, lifestyle), the environmental context, and the technology's…
- Mean Power Frequency (MPF, Mean Frequency)
- Mean power frequency is a single-number summary of a signal's frequency content, computed as the power-spectrum-weighted mean of frequency. In surface-EMG-based accessibility input devices, MPF of eac…
- Meta-Research (Research on research, Metascience)
- The systematic study of research itself — the tools, workflows, norms, infrastructures, and institutional practices through which scholarly knowledge is produced, evaluated, and disseminated. Meta-res…
- Minimum Clinically Important Difference (MCID, Minimal Clinically Important Difference)
- The smallest change in a measurement that is perceived as beneficial or meaningful from a clinical perspective. MCID thresholds help researchers and clinicians distinguish statistically significant ch…
- Minimum String Distance (MSD, Edit Distance, Levenshtein Distance)
- A metric for measuring text entry accuracy by calculating the minimum number of single-character insertions, deletions, and substitutions needed to transform the transcribed text into the intended tex…