Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
47 results found in accessibility principles.
- Electronic Curb-Cut Effect (Digital Curb-Cut Effect, Curb-Cut Effect)
- The phenomenon where accessibility features originally designed for people with disabilities end up benefiting a much wider population. Named after physical curb cuts in sidewalks — originally mandate…
- Employment Accessibility (Workplace Accessibility, Job Accessibility, Accessible Employment)
- The broad concept of ensuring that all aspects of finding, applying for, interviewing for, and performing a job are accessible to people with disabilities. Employment accessibility encompasses accessi…
- Enforced Trust (Compelled Trust)
- A dynamic in which blind people are required to trust technologies, sighted individuals, and systems without having independent means to verify the information or outputs provided to them. Enforced tr…
- Fluctuating Access Needs (Dynamic Access Needs, Variable Access Needs)
- Accessibility requirements that change over time for a single individual, varying based on factors such as energy levels, symptoms, time of day, environment, medication, menstrual cycle, cognitive loa…
- Holistic Accessibility (Holistic Approach to Accessibility)
- Holistic accessibility is an approach that considers web accessibility not as an isolated technical concern but as one factor within a broader context including usability, user experience, audience ch…
- Human-Centered Design (HCD, User-Centered Design, UCD)
- A design approach that prioritizes the needs, capabilities, and experiences of end users throughout the design process. Popularized by IDEO and formalized in ISO 9241-210, human-centered design involv…
- Input Redundancy
- A design principle that provides multiple alternative ways to accomplish the same input action, ensuring that users can interact with a system regardless of their specific abilities. In VR accessibili…
- Multimodal Interface (Multimodal Interaction, Multi-Modal UI)
- A multimodal interface is a system that communicates with users through multiple sensory channels simultaneously, such as speech, haptic feedback, sound, vibration, and visual output. In accessible na…
- Music Notation Accessibility
- The practice of making written music scores perceivable and usable by musicians with visual impairments and other disabilities. This encompasses the creation of alternative formats like Braille Music,…
- OM Principle (Object Model Principle)
- A design principle for accessible digital content stating that any digital object is made more accessible by using the application's designated object model for that content rather than visual workaro…
- Preference Customization (User Preference Configuration, Personalization Settings)
- The ability for users, particularly those using assistive technologies, to configure how they receive and interact with digital content based on their individual needs, preferences, and context. In ac…
- Presumed Competence (Least Dangerous Assumption)
- The principle that all individuals should be assumed capable and intelligent regardless of whether their abilities are displayed in ways that conform to societal norms. Advocated particularly by nonsp…
- Privacy by Design (PbD)
- A framework that embeds privacy protections into the design and architecture of systems and business practices from the outset, rather than adding them as afterthoughts. In the context of visual assis…
- Psychological Accessibility
- A dimension of accessibility concerned with whether users find a product or service useful, appropriate, and satisfying, beyond being merely technically operable. Psychological accessibility addresses…
- Sensory Accessibility
- The design of environments, technologies, and experiences to accommodate people with diverse sensory processing needs, including those with heightened or reduced sensitivity to sound, light, touch, sm…
- Sighted Bias (Visual Bias, Ocularcentrism)
- The tendency in technology design to privilege sighted ways of perceiving and understanding the world, often unconsciously centering visual sensibilities in interfaces, descriptions, and assessment cr…
- Sighted-Centric Design (Vision-Centric Design)
- Design approaches and practices that privilege sighted sensemaking and marginalize blind and non-visual ways of relating to the world. Sighted-centered design produces technologies, interfaces, and de…
- Situational Disability (Situational Impairment, Contextual Disability)
- A temporary limitation in ability caused by environmental circumstances rather than a permanent condition. Examples include being unable to read a screen in bright sunlight (visual), not hearing audio…
- Spatial Assessment (Spatial Descriptor)
- The use of spatial attributes such as distance, dimensions, and location to describe objects in a visual scene. Research with blind users has found that spatial assessment descriptors are problematic …
- Technoableism
- A concept describing how technology is framed as a solution to disability in ways that reinforce ableist assumptions, treating disability primarily as a problem to be fixed rather than a form of human…