Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
840 results found in assistive technology.
- Remote sighted assistance (RSA, Visual interpreting service)
- A service connecting blind or visually impaired individuals with sighted helpers through live video calls, enabling real-time visual guidance for everyday tasks. Services like Be My Eyes (volunteer-ba…
- Remote therapy (Teletherapy, Telepractice, Telerehabilitation)
- The delivery of therapeutic interventions — including speech therapy, occupational therapy, and rehabilitation — through technology-mediated communication rather than exclusively in-person sessions. R…
- Repeat Keys (Key Repeat Delay)
- An operating system accessibility feature that controls how long a key must be held down before it begins to repeat, and how quickly it repeats once started. For users with motor disabilities who unin…
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
- An AI technique that enhances the responses of large language models (LLMs) by first retrieving relevant information from an external knowledge base or document collection, then providing that informa…
- Reverse Dictionary (Sign-to-English Dictionary, ASL-to-English Dictionary)
- A dictionary tool that allows users to search for the meaning of a sign language sign by inputting its visual or linguistic properties — such as handshape, location, movement, and orientation — rather…
- Risk-Free Exploration (Safe Exploration)
- Risk-free exploration is a design principle for making touchscreen interfaces accessible to blind users by enabling them to explore the screen surface without accidentally triggering interface actions…
- Robot-Assisted Feeding (Assistive Feeding Robot, Robotic Feeding System, RAF)
- A robotic system designed to help people with upper-limb motor impairments eat independently by automating the process of acquiring food from a plate and transferring it to the user's mouth. Robot-ass…
- SLPAT (Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies)
- A special interest group jointly supported by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), focused on speech and language technolo…
- Safe Walking Technology (Safe Walking Aids, Walking Safety Devices)
- Assistive technologies designed to help people with cognitive impairments, particularly dementia, walk safely outdoors. These devices typically combine GPS tracking, navigation assistance, fall detect…
- Scanning (Switch Scanning, Sequential Scanning)
- An input method used in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) that allows users with severe motor impairments to make selections using one or more switches. The system sequentially highligh…
- Scanning Delay (Tscan, Scan Rate, Dwell Time)
- The time interval a scanning system waits before automatically advancing to highlight the next item. Setting scanning delay appropriately is critical for switch access users: too short causes selectio…
- Scanning interface (Switch scanning, Single-switch access)
- An interaction method in which items on a screen are sequentially highlighted one at a time (or in groups), and the user activates a switch to select the currently highlighted item. Scanning interface…
- Scatter Plot Accessibility
- The set of techniques and design considerations for making scatter plot data visualizations accessible to people with disabilities, particularly blind and low-vision users. Scatter plots present uniqu…
- Scene Classification (Scene Recognition, Scene Understanding)
- Scene classification is a computer vision task that categorizes images or video frames into predefined scene types such as indoor/outdoor, kitchen, office, or street. For accessibility, scene classifi…
- Scene Reading (Scene Reader, 3-D Screen Reading)
- An interaction paradigm that extends touch-based screen reading concepts from 2-D interfaces to 3-D virtual environments, enabling blind and low vision users to explore virtual scenes nonvisually. Sce…
- Scene Text Recognition (Scene Text Detection, Text in the Wild, Environmental Text Detection)
- The computer vision task of detecting and reading text that appears naturally in real-world environments, such as street signs, product labels, shop names, and building numbers. Unlike optical charact…
- Screen Magnification (Screen Magnifier, Zoom)
- Software or built-in operating system features that enlarge a portion of the screen display to make content more readable for people with low vision. Screen magnification tools are available on all ma…
- Screen Reader (Screen Reading Software)
- Assistive technology software that converts on-screen text, interface elements, and structured content into synthesized speech or Braille output, enabling blind and low vision users to navigate and in…
- Screen Reader (Screen Reading Software)
- An assistive technology application that converts digital text and interface elements into synthesized speech or braille output, enabling people who are blind or have low vision to interact with compu…
- Screen Reader Navigation (Keyboard Navigation with Screen Reader, Sequential Navigation)
- The methods by which blind and visually impaired users move through digital content using a screen reader, primarily via keyboard shortcuts and gestures rather than a mouse or visual scanning. Screen …