Glossary

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

43 results found in document accessibility.

Accessibility Evaluation Framework (A11y Assessment Framework, Accessibility Testing Framework)
A structured methodology for systematically assessing the accessibility of digital content, products, or services against established standards and guidelines. Effective frameworks define the criteria…
Accessible PDF (Tagged PDF, PDF/UA)
An accessible PDF is a Portable Document Format file that has been structured with tags, reading order, alternative text for images, and other metadata so that it can be navigated and read by assistiv…
Accessible Slides (Accessible Presentation Slides, Non-Visually Accessible Slides)
Presentation slides that have been structured and annotated to be usable by people with disabilities, particularly blind and visually impaired users who access content via screen readers. Accessible s…
Artifact (PDF artifact, Background artifact)
In PDF accessibility, an artifact is content that is marked as decorative or non-essential and should be ignored by assistive technologies. Examples include page numbers, headers/footers, decorative i…
AsTeR (Audio System for Technical Readings)
An interactive computing system developed by T. V. Raman in his 1994 PhD thesis at Cornell University that converts LaTeX documents into navigable audio documents. AsTeR parses electronic documents in…
Audio Formatting (Audio Rendering)
The process of converting structured electronic documents into audio output that conveys not just textual content but also the logical structure and formatting of the original document. Audio formatti…
Borne-Accessible Document (born-accessible, natively accessible document)
A document that is created accessibly from the outset—its semantic structure, headings, alt text, and tags are built in at authoring time rather than added later through remediation. Borne-accessible …
Composite Figure (Multi-panel Figure, Multi-element Figure)
A figure that contains multiple distinct visual elements combined into a single image, such as a series of screenshots labeled (a) through (f), a set of charts showing different data sets, or a mix of…
Content Element (Visual Content Element, Non-Text Content)
A visual component within a document that conveys information beyond running text, including tables, charts, images, diagrams, equations, and code blocks. Content elements are often chosen for their a…
Content tagging (Structural tagging, Semantic tagging)
The process of adding structural markup to document content that identifies the role and meaning of each element. In PDF accessibility, content tagging involves marking regions of a document as paragr…
Digital Talking Book (DTB, DAISY Digital Talking Book, Talking book)
A multimedia document format that synchronises text, audio narration, and navigation structure to provide accessible reading experiences for people who are blind, have low vision, or have print disabi…
DocBook (DocBook XML)
An XML-based markup language designed for technical documentation and publishing, providing a semantic vocabulary for books, articles, and other prose documents. DocBook separates content from present…
Document Analysis (Document Image Analysis, DIA)
The process of automatically extracting structure, content, and meaning from document images or files, including layout detection, text recognition, and logical structure identification. In accessibil…
Document Layout Analysis (DLA, page layout analysis)
A computer-vision task that identifies and classifies the visual regions of a document page—headings, paragraphs, tables, figures, captions, lists, headers, and footers—typically using object-detectio…
Document structure (Structural hierarchy, Document hierarchy)
The logical organization of a document into meaningful components such as headings, sections, paragraphs, lists, and tables. Proper document structure enables assistive technology users to navigate ef…
Exif (Exchangeable Image File Format, EXIF)
A standard metadata format embedded within image files (JPEG, TIFF, and others) that stores information about how an image was created, including camera model, date, GPS coordinates, and orientation. …
Figure Accessibility (Chart Accessibility, Graph Accessibility)
The practice of making visual figures, charts, graphs, and diagrams in documents and publications accessible to people who cannot see them, particularly blind and low vision users. Figure accessibilit…
Font Embedding (Embedded Fonts, PDF Font Embedding)
The practice of including the complete font data within a PDF document so that the text can be accurately rendered and read regardless of whether the font is installed on the viewer's system. Font emb…
ICADD (International Committee on Accessible Document Design)
A non-profit organization that developed techniques for making structured electronic documents accessible to people with print disabilities. ICADD created the SDA (SGML Document Access) mechanism — a …
LaTeX (TeX)
A document typesetting language widely used in academia and STEM fields for producing scientific documents containing complex mathematical formulae. LaTeX encodes mathematical content as plain text ma…