Glossary

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

16 results found in accessible design.

Ability-Based Design (ABD)
A design paradigm for accessible technology introduced by Jacob Wobbrock and colleagues that emphasizes adapting systems to meet users' abilities rather than requiring users to adapt to systems. Abili…
Accessibility Persona (Disability Persona, Inclusive Persona)
A detailed, realistic description of a hypothetical user with specific disabilities, assistive technology configurations, and usage contexts, used during design and evaluation to help teams consider a…
Accessible Content Creation (Accessible Authoring)
The design of tools, workflows, and processes that enable people with disabilities to create original content — including visual illustrations, documents, presentations, and multimedia — independently…
Blocks4All
An accessible touchscreen-based block-based programming environment designed for students with visual impairments. Blocks4All enables drag-and-drop-like programming interactions on touchscreen devices…
Code Jumper (Project Torino)
An accessible physical programming toolkit originally developed by Microsoft Research (under the name Project Torino) that uses tangible pods connected by cables to teach programming concepts to child…
Communicational Accessibility (Communicative Accessibility)
An approach to accessible design that goes beyond providing access to raw content (content accessibility) to preserving the designer's intended communicative strategy across all modalities and for all…
Device Independence (Device-Independent Design, Input Agnostic Design)
A web design principle that ensures content and functionality are accessible regardless of the input device or interaction method used to access them. Device-independent design avoids assumptions abou…
End-User Customization (User Customization, Personalisation)
The ability for users to modify the presentation or behaviour of a digital interface according to their individual preferences and needs. In accessibility, end-user customization is particularly impor…
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…
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…
Quorum (Quorum Programming Language)
An evidence-based programming language designed with accessibility as a core principle, making it usable by people with and without visual impairments. Quorum provides audio input and output, screen r…
Shift-Left Accessibility (Early-Stage Accessibility, Accessibility by Design)
An approach to software development that moves accessibility considerations earlier in the development lifecycle — from testing and remediation phases to requirements gathering and design phases. The …
Social Accessibility
A design paradigm introduced by Shinohara and colleagues emphasizing that assistive technologies must be designed for the social worlds they will be used within, not just for functional task completio…
Swift Playgrounds (Apple Swift Playgrounds)
A hybrid block-based and text-based programming environment developed by Apple for iPad and Mac that teaches coding using the Swift programming language. Swift Playgrounds is notable in the accessibil…
Tangible Programming (Physical Programming, Tangible Coding, Tactile Programming)
A programming approach that uses physical objects — such as blocks, cards, or robots — that users can manipulate with their hands to create programs, rather than typing code or dragging on-screen elem…
Tile-Based Interface (Tile-Based Interaction)
An interaction paradigm that represents spatial content as a grid of discrete, navigable tiles rather than a continuous coordinate plane. In accessible design contexts, tile-based interfaces provide b…