Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
49 results found in disability theory.
- Access as Friction
- A disability-studies framing, articulated by Jackson, Haagaard, and Williams, that reframes accessibility work as productive friction rather than seamless accommodation. Rather than smoothing every in…
- Adversarial Stakeholders
- Individuals, institutions, or systems that disabled people depend on for access but that simultaneously pose threats of harm. Examples include healthcare providers who discriminate based on stigmatize…
- Affirmative Model of Disability (Affirmation Model)
- A disability framework that goes beyond the social model by acknowledging disabled individuals's lived experiences and emphasizing their abilities, strengths, and unique perspectives rather than limit…
- Agency (User Agency, Sense of Agency)
- The capacity to act, make choices, and exert control over one's own life and environment. In disability studies, agency is distinguished from independence — a person can have agency (the ability to ma…
- Assistive Strategy (Access Strategy)
- Any approach, technique, or workaround that a disabled person develops to navigate inaccessibility and meet their needs. Unlike formal assistive technologies, assistive strategies may be informal, imp…
- Autism Industrial Complex (AIC)
- A term coined by Alicia Broderick and Robin Roscigno to describe the commercial ecosystem that treats autism as a commodity, establishing it as a normative cultural narrative that necessitates interve…
- Bodily Autonomy
- The right of individuals to make decisions about their own bodies, including how they use their bodies for work, what medical treatments they receive, and how they manage their physical and mental hea…
- 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…
- 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…
- Critical Disability Studies (CDS)
- An interdisciplinary academic field that examines disability as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon rather than solely a medical condition. Critical disability studies analyzes how disability…
- Critical Disability Theory (Critical Disability Studies, CDT)
- An interdisciplinary theoretical framework that examines disability as a social, political, and cultural phenomenon rather than solely a medical condition. Critical disability theory draws on disabili…
- Critical Gerontology
- An interdisciplinary approach to the study of aging that critiques the dominant biomedical framing of later life and foregrounds structural, political, and cultural influences on older people's experi…
- Cure Narrative (Cure Rhetoric, Fix-It Mentality)
- A dominant cultural narrative that frames disability as a problem to be eliminated, cured, or overcome through medical intervention, technology, or personal determination. Cure narratives position the…
- Cyborg (Cybernetic Organism)
- A being that integrates both organic and technological components, extending human capabilities through mechanical or digital augmentation. In disability studies and accessibility research, the cyborg…
- Deficit-Based Approach (Deficit Model, Deficit Framing, Deficit Perspective)
- An approach that focuses primarily on what individuals cannot do, what skills they lack, or what is "wrong" with them, rather than their strengths, abilities, and potential. In disability and accessib…
- Disability Dongle
- A term coined by disability advocate Liz Jackson describing a well-intentioned but ultimately useless technology solution created for disabled people by non-disabled people who have not engaged with t…
- Disabling by Design (Designed Disability, Systemic Disablement)
- A critical framework describing how systems, policies, and processes create disability through their design rather than through malicious intent. When a system requires cognitive, physical, or sensory…
- Duality (Dual Lives)
- The practice of managing plural identities across different contexts, where a person lives dual work lives and maintains separate identity presentations depending on the stakeholders they are interact…
- Emotional Agency
- The ability of an individual to independently manage their emotional responses and experiences, particularly when encountering sensitive or personal information. In the context of accessibility and ge…
- Epistemic Barrier (Knowledge Barrier, Epistemic Divide)
- A barrier to collaboration or understanding that arises from fundamental differences in knowledge systems, expertise, values, and ways of knowing between groups. In the context of sign language AI dev…