Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
108 results found in accessibility.
- Blind Sports (Visually Impaired Sports)
- Athletic activities designed for or adapted to enable participation by people who are blind or have low vision. These sports rely on non-visual cues, particularly sound, to make gameplay accessible — …
- Bodymind
- A concept from disability studies, introduced by Margaret Price and widely adopted by disability scholars and activists, referring to the inseparable integration of body and mind as a single entity. T…
- Bodymind Barrier (Bodymind Access Barrier)
- A type of access barrier where performing a task leads to an undesirable physical or mental state, such as pain, fatigue, nausea, dizziness, anxiety, or sensory overload. The task may be technically c…
- Braille Music Notation (Braille Music, Braille Music Code)
- A tactile system for representing musical notation using the six-dot braille cell, encoding pitch, duration, dynamics, and other musical information for blind and visually impaired musicians. Unlike s…
- CVAA (Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act)
- The 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, enacted in the United States in 2010 and updated in 2020, which requires major broadcast and cable networks to make online video content ac…
- Captions (Subtitles, Text Captions)
- Text displayed on screen that represents the audio content of a video, including spoken dialogue and important sound effects. Captions are essential for deaf and hard of hearing viewers but also benef…
- Closed Captions (CC)
- Captions that can be turned on or off by the viewer, as opposed to open captions which are permanently embedded in the video. Closed captions typically include not just dialogue but also descriptions …
- Cognitive Accessibility (Cognitive A11y)
- The practice of designing digital content and interfaces to be usable by people with cognitive, intellectual, learning, and neurological disabilities. Cognitive accessibility addresses barriers relate…
- Color Vision Deficiency (Color Blindness, CVD, Colour Blindness)
- A condition in which a person has difficulty distinguishing between certain colors, most commonly red and green (deuteranopia/protanopia), but also blue and yellow (tritanopia) or all colors (achromat…
- Combination Repertoire
- A type of technology repertoire where multiple tools work together simultaneously to provide access for a single task. For example, a person who is deaf and hard of hearing might use automatic caption…
- Community-Driven Accessibility (Crowdsourced Accessibility, Peer-Driven Accessibility)
- Accessibility improvements initiated and maintained by community members rather than platform operators or content creators. Examples include viewers adding timestamps and chapter breakdowns in video …
- Consequence Calculus
- The decision-making process by which disabled individuals weigh all available options for addressing an access barrier and select the option that best matches their priorities given their contextual f…
- Consequence-Based Accessibility
- A framework introduced by Mack and McDonnell that describes how people with chronic illnesses experience access barriers where the consequences of their actions, rather than the nature of the task its…
- Content Focus (Content Focus Mode, Presentation Focus)
- A video layout customization option that enlarges and centers the primary visual content being discussed—such as presentation slides, demonstrations, or graphical illustrations—while removing or minim…
- Content Quality (Information Quality)
- The accuracy, reliability, completeness, and trustworthiness of information presented in digital content. For health-related and disability-related content on social media and video platforms, content…
- Content Wants (Information Wants, Content Preferences)
- The specific types of information that a user desires or needs from a piece of content, as opposed to information needs imposed by an external system or standard. In image accessibility research, cont…
- Context-Aware (Context-Aware Design, Context-Sensitive)
- An approach to designing systems, content, or interfaces that adapt their behavior or output based on the context in which they are used, including the user's goals, the platform or source where conte…
- Contextual Factors
- The characteristics of a person, their tools, or their environment that influence experiences of access or inaccessibility. Contextual factors include identity-related factors (race, gender, class, ag…
- Data Physicalization (Physical Data Visualization)
- The practice of representing data through physical, tangible objects rather than on-screen visualizations. Data physicalizations encode information in the shape, texture, size, weight, or other physic…
- Deaf Tech (Deaf-Centered Technology)
- A framework and design orientation for technologies created by, with, and centering Deaf communities. Deaf Tech emphasizes participatory design, cultural relevance, and alignment with Deaf epistemolog…