Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
18 results found in Sensory.
- Acoustic Accessibility (Sound Accessibility)
- An emerging framing of accessibility that considers a user's full acoustic environment - which sounds reach them, how loud, and in what mix - as a design surface to be adapted to individual sensory ne…
- Active Noise Cancellation (ANC, Active Noise Control)
- A technique that reduces unwanted ambient sound by using microphones to capture incoming noise and electronically generating an inverted (anti-phase) audio signal that destructively interferes with it…
- Affective Congruency
- The degree to which a system's sensory outputs, interactions, and feedback align emotionally with the user's current affective state and the emotional meaning the user attaches to the experience. Dist…
- Cross-Modal Perception (Multisensory perception, Cross-modal integration)
- The neural and perceptual integration of information arriving through two or more sensory channels — such as vision, hearing, touch, and proprioception — into a coherent experience of the world. Cross…
- Cross-modal Congruency
- The temporal, spatial, and semantic alignment of sensory cues during an interaction — for example, a visual event and its accompanying sound occurring at the same moment and in the same location, with…
- Kinesthetic (Kinaesthetic)
- Kinesthetic refers to the sense of body movement, limb position and muscular effort, arising from receptors in muscles, tendons and joints and closely related to proprioception. In accessibility and i…
- Kinesthetic Perception (Kinesthesia, Proprioceptive Perception)
- The sensory ability to perceive the position, movement, and forces acting on one's body and limbs through receptors in muscles, tendons, and joints. Kinesthetic perception encompasses awareness of lim…
- Kinesthetics (Kinaesthetics, Kinesthesia, Kinesthetic sense)
- The sense of body position, movement, and muscular effort derived from receptors in muscles, tendons, and joints. Kinesthetics is closely related to — and often used interchangeably with — propriocept…
- Material Perception (Material recognition)
- The perceptual processes by which people identify and characterize the materials that objects are made of — such as wood, metal, glass, leather, fabric, or stone — using visual, tactile, auditory, and…
- Multisensory Interaction (Multisensory HCI)
- Multisensory interaction is an HCI research area concerned with designing and studying systems that engage two or more human senses - sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, proprioception - simultaneous…
- Multisensory Stimulation (MSS)
- A therapeutic and design approach that intentionally coordinates multiple sensory modalities — visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and kinetic — to support affective well-being, cognitive engagement…
- Olfactory Display (Olfactory Interface, Olfactory Feedback, Smell Display, Scent Display)
- An olfactory display is a hardware system that delivers controlled scent stimuli to a user, typically as part of a virtual reality, augmented reality, or multisensory interaction system. Designs range…
- Sensory Adaptation (Habituation, Olfactory Fatigue)
- Sensory adaptation is the diminishing response of a sensory system to a constant or repeated stimulus over time. Classic examples include no longer noticing a steady smell, becoming accustomed to ambi…
- Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS, Sensory Processing Differences)
- Sensory Processing Sensitivity refers to differences in how an individual perceives, filters, and responds to sensory input across modalities such as vision, sound, touch, taste, and proprioception. I…
- Somatosensory (Somatosensation, Bodily Sensation)
- Relating to the sensory system that processes touch, pressure, temperature, pain, and body position (proprioception). The somatosensory system is crucial for accessibility technologies that bypass vis…
- Synaesthesia (Synesthesia)
- Synaesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which a stimulus in one sensory modality automatically and involuntarily triggers an additional experience in a different modality or sub-modality - for exam…
- Tactile Stimulation (Tactile Feedback, Cutaneous Stimulation)
- Tactile stimulation refers to the use of physical sensations delivered to the skin to convey information, typically through vibrations, pin arrays, textures, or pressure changes. In assistive technolo…
- Texture Perception (Texture sense, Tactile texture perception)
- The perceptual capacity to detect and characterize surface properties — roughness, smoothness, bumpiness, graininess, stickiness, and directional patterns — through touch, vision, or cross-modal integ…