Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
148 results found in disability studies.
- Charity Model of Disability (Charity Model)
- A framework that views people with disabilities as helpless victims who are dependent on the goodwill and benevolence of others. Under this model, disability is treated as a tragedy requiring charitab…
- Chronic Illness (Chronic Condition, Long-Term Illness)
- Health conditions that persist for an extended period, typically more than three months, and may require ongoing management but do not necessarily have a cure. Examples include diabetes, fibromyalgia,…
- Civil Inattention
- A social behavior theorized by sociologist Erving Goffman describing how strangers in public spaces acknowledge each other's presence through brief eye contact or a nod, then deliberately look away to…
- Collaborative Access (Collective Access)
- An approach to accessibility that frames access as a shared, negotiated process involving multiple stakeholders rather than an individual accommodation provided to a single person. Collaborative acces…
- Community Sustainability (Research Sustainability)
- The principle that research practices should not deplete, harm, or overburden the communities from which participants are recruited. In accessibility research, community sustainability requires consid…
- Compensatory Technology (Compensatory Approach)
- Assistive technology designed primarily to offset or make up for a person's functional limitations, focusing on what the person cannot do rather than building on their existing abilities. While compen…
- Compulsory Able-Bodiedness (Compulsory Ableness)
- A concept from disability studies scholar Robert McRuer describing the pervasive social assumption that all people should aspire to and perform able-bodiedness as the default, desirable state. Like co…
- 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…
- 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…
- Creative Agency (Creative Autonomy, Creative Control)
- The ability of an individual to make independent creative decisions, express personal aesthetic preferences, and maintain ownership over the creative process and its outcomes. For blind individuals, c…
- Crip Epistemology (Cripistemology)
- A framework for understanding how disability produces distinct forms of knowledge that challenge dominant, ableist ways of knowing. Rooted in crip theory and disability studies, crip epistemologies re…
- Crip Spacetime
- A concept developed by disability-studies scholar Margaret Price to describe the material-discursive reality in which disabled people live according to temporalities and spatialities that remain invis…
- Crip Technoscience (Critical Disability Technoscience)
- A framework articulated by Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch that examines how disabled people engage with, repurpose, and create technologies from their own embodied knowledge and political standpoints.…
- Crip Theory (Crip Studies, Critical Disability Theory)
- A theoretical framework that reclaims the word "crip" (from "cripple") as a positive identity and analytical lens for challenging normative assumptions about bodies, ability, and disability. Rooted in…
- Crip Theory (Crip, Crip Technoscience)
- An academic and activist framework that reclaims "crip" as a positive identity term, challenging normative assumptions about disability, ability, and bodily difference. Emerging from queer theory and …
- Crip time (Crip temporality)
- A disability studies concept, developed by scholar Alison Kafer, that recognizes how disabled and chronically ill people experience and navigate time differently due to bodily, cognitive, or systemic …
- Cripepistemology (Crip knowledge, Disabled knowledge)
- A framework recognizing that disability itself is a valuable way of knowing about the world — that disabled people acquire deep, embodied knowledge from their experiences navigating inaccessible envir…
- Cripping (Crip practices)
- Practices or actions taken by disabled people to disrupt the status quo, flip ableist norms, and work toward a more accessible and just world. Cripping can involve material changes (hacking environmen…
- Critical Autoethnography
- A qualitative research method that combines personal narrative with critical analysis of systems of power, privilege, and oppression. Unlike traditional autoethnography, the critical variant explicitl…