Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
77 results found in ethics.
- Disability dongle
- A well-intentioned but impractical accessibility invention, typically created by non-disabled people, that fails to address the actual needs of disabled users. The term, coined by disability advocate …
- Emotion Recognition (Facial Emotion Recognition, FER, Affect Recognition)
- AI technology that attempts to identify human emotional states from facial expressions, voice patterns, body language, or physiological signals. Emotion recognition systems have been widely criticized…
- Empathy Simulation (Disability Simulation, Impairment Simulation)
- A design technique where non-disabled people temporarily simulate a disability experience — such as wearing a blindfold, using a wheelchair, or restricting hand movement — to develop empathy and under…
- Enforced Trust (Compelled Trust)
- A dynamic in which blind people are required to trust technologies, sighted individuals, and systems without having independent means to verify the information or outputs provided to them. Enforced tr…
- Epistemic Injustice (Knowledge Injustice)
- A form of injustice that occurs when someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower — either by having their testimony dismissed or undervalued (testimonial injustice) or by lacking the conceptual r…
- Ethics Washing (Ethics-Washing)
- The practice of creating the illusion of high ethical standards through superficial transparency efforts, ethics committees, or principles documentation while actual practices do not reflect these sta…
- Face Recognition (Facial Recognition, Face Detection)
- A technology that uses computer vision and machine learning to identify or verify a person by analysing their facial features from images or video. In accessibility contexts, face recognition has sign…
- Fair Compensation (Equitable Compensation, Research Compensation)
- The practice of providing adequate and equitable payment to research participants for their time, expertise, and contributions. In accessibility research, fair compensation is particularly important b…
- Forced Intimacy
- Forced Intimacy is a concept coined by disability and transformative justice activist Mia Mingus that describes the experience of disabled people being expected to share very personal information with…
- Fraudulent Participants (Impostor Participants, Fake Participants)
- Individuals who falsely claim to meet a study's eligibility criteria in order to participate in research, typically for financial compensation. In accessibility research, fraudulent participants may c…
- Gender recognition (Automatic gender recognition, AGR, Gender classification)
- AI technology that attempts to infer a person's gender from visual features such as facial characteristics, body shape, or voice. Gender recognition systems are controversial in accessibility contexts…
- Human-like trust in AI (Anthropomorphic trust)
- The phenomenon where users develop trust in AI systems based on their human-like qualities — such as natural voice, conversational style, emotional expressiveness, and social behaviors — rather than t…
- Inclusive AI (Accessible AI, Disability-Inclusive Artificial Intelligence)
- The design and development of artificial intelligence systems that account for the needs, experiences, and data of people with disabilities and other marginalized groups. Inclusive AI requires represe…
- Informational Privacy (Information Privacy, Data Privacy)
- The ability of individuals to control information about themselves—determining what personal data is collected, who can access it, and how it is used. In assistive technology contexts, informational p…
- Informed Consent
- The process by which individuals are provided with clear, understandable information about how their data will be collected, used, and shared, enabling them to make voluntary decisions about participa…
- Linguistic Imperialism (Language Imperialism)
- The imposition of one language or language modality over others, often by dominant groups over minority language communities. In deaf contexts, linguistic imperialism manifests when spoken language is…
- Medicalization (Medical gatekeeping)
- The process by which human conditions and differences are defined, categorized, and treated as medical problems requiring clinical intervention. In disability and AI contexts, medicalization is reinfo…
- Misgendering
- The act of referring to someone using language that does not reflect their gender identity, such as incorrect pronouns, titles, or gendered terms. In digital accessibility and AI contexts, misgenderin…
- Ocular normativity (Ocularcentrism, Ocular norm, Visual normativity)
- A concept from critical disability studies describing the cultural assumption that sight is the primary, most reliable, and most natural mode of knowing and perceiving the world. Ocular normativity po…
- Participant Recruitment (Research Recruitment, Subject Recruitment)
- The process of identifying, inviting, and enrolling individuals to participate in research studies. In accessibility research, participant recruitment presents unique challenges including ensuring int…