Glossary

Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.

62 results found in Web Development.

AJAX (Ajax, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)
AJAX is a set of web development techniques that allow web pages to communicate with a server and update portions of the page content without requiring a full page reload. AJAX poses major accessibili…
ARIA Live Region (Live Region, aria-live)
A section of a web page marked with the aria-live attribute that is dynamically updated and should be announced by assistive technologies when changes occur, even if the user's focus is elsewhere. Liv…
Accessibility API (Accessibility Application Programming Interface, Platform Accessibility API)
A software interface provided by operating systems and browsers that exposes information about user interface elements — including their roles, states, properties, and relationships — to assistive tec…
Accessibility Repair (Automated Accessibility Repair, Accessibility Remediation)
Accessibility repair refers to the process of identifying and fixing accessibility barriers in digital content, ranging from manual remediation by developers to automated tools that can detect and cor…
Adaptive Rendering (Content Adaptation, Dynamic Rendering)
The process of automatically modifying how web content is presented based on a user's needs, preferences, or device capabilities. Adaptive rendering can involve transformations such as adjusting layou…
Anchor Text (Link Text, Hyperlink Text)
The visible, clickable text within a hypertext link that is intended to describe the link's destination or purpose. Descriptive anchor text (e.g., "download the annual report") provides clear informat…
Aria-Live (ARIA Live Region, Live Region)
An ARIA attribute (aria-live) used to designate regions of a web page whose content may change dynamically, ensuring that assistive technologies announce updates to users without requiring them to nav…
Auto-label (Automatic Labeling, Heuristic Labeling)
A feature in authoring tools or runtime environments that automatically generates accessible labels for interactive elements when a developer has not explicitly provided one. For example, Adobe Flash …
Back-end Development (Server-side Development, Back-end Engineering)
The practice of building server-side logic, databases, APIs, and application architecture that power websites and applications. Back-end developers work with languages like Python, Java, Ruby, and Nod…
Browser Accessibility (Accessible Browsing, Web Browser Accessibility)
The degree to which web browsers themselves are usable by people with disabilities and age-related impairments, distinct from the accessibility of web content. Browser accessibility encompasses built-…
Browser Developer Tools (DevTools, Web Inspector, Developer Console)
Built-in browser utilities that allow web developers to inspect, debug, and modify web pages in real-time. Features include DOM inspection, CSS editing, JavaScript debugging, network monitoring, and p…
Browser Helper Object (BHO)
A plugin module for web browsers (originally Internet Explorer) that loads with each browser instance and has access to the Document Object Model and browser events. In accessibility contexts, BHOs ha…
CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart)
A challenge-response test used on websites to determine whether a user is human, typically requiring users to identify distorted text, select images, or solve puzzles. CAPTCHAs present significant acc…
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS, Stylesheets)
A stylesheet language used to describe the visual presentation of HTML documents, controlling layout, colors, fonts, spacing, and responsive design. CSS is intentionally separated from HTML content to…
DHTML (Dynamic HTML)
Dynamic HTML (DHTML) is a collective term for a combination of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the Document Object Model (DOM) used together to create interactive and animated web content, prevalent in the…
DOM Manipulation (DOM Modification, Document Object Model Manipulation)
The programmatic modification of a webpage's Document Object Model (DOM) to change its structure, content, styling, or behavior. In accessibility contexts, DOM manipulation is used by browser extensio…
Data Table (Genuine Table)
An HTML table element used to present structured, tabular information where data cells have a logical relationship to header cells. Accessible data tables require proper semantic markup including th e…
Document Object Model (DOM)
A programming interface for web documents that represents the page as a tree of objects, where each HTML element is a node that can be accessed and manipulated programmatically. The DOM is fundamental…
Document Object Model (DOM)
A programming interface that represents the structure of an HTML or XML document as a tree of objects, where each element, attribute, and piece of text becomes a node that can be programmatically acce…
Dojo Toolkit (Dojo)
An open-source JavaScript toolkit for building Ajax web applications, notable in accessibility history for being one of the first major frameworks to incorporate WAI-ARIA support. In 2006, IBM contrib…