Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
45 results found in perception.
- Kinesthetic Awareness (Kinesthesia, Movement Awareness)
- The conscious perception of body position, movement, and muscle tension derived from internal sensory receptors in muscles, tendons, and joints. For sighted people, kinesthetic awareness is reinforced…
- Multisensory (Multisensory Design, Multisensory Interaction)
- An approach to design and interaction that engages multiple human senses — such as sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste — to convey information and create richer experiences. In accessibility, mult…
- Optic Flow (Visual Flow, Optical Flow)
- The pattern of apparent motion of objects, surfaces, and edges in a visual scene caused by relative movement between the observer and the scene. Optic flow provides critical information about self-mot…
- Parallax (Visual Parallax, Binocular Parallax)
- Parallax is the apparent displacement or difference in position of an object when viewed from two different vantage points. In human vision, binocular parallax — the slight difference between the imag…
- Perceptual Span (Reading Span, Visual Span)
- The area of text around a fixation point from which useful information can be extracted during reading. Research using eye-tracking has shown that skilled deaf readers have a larger perceptual span th…
- Peripheral Awareness (Peripheral Perception, Ambient Awareness)
- The innate ability to unconsciously maintain and constantly update a sense of one's social and physical surroundings without actively directing attention to them. In accessibility contexts, peripheral…
- Phantom Sensation (Phantom Vibration, Vibrotactile Illusion)
- A phantom sensation is a perceptual illusion in which two vibrotactile actuators stimulating the skin simultaneously create the feeling of a single vibration at a point between them. By varying the am…
- Presence (Virtual Presence, Sense of Presence)
- The subjective sense of being in a virtual environment, often described as the feeling of "being there" rather than simply observing a digital display. Presence is a central construct in VR research a…
- Proprioception (Proprioceptive Sense, Body Position Sense)
- The body's ability to sense its own position, movement, and orientation in space without relying on vision. Proprioceptive information comes from sensory receptors in muscles, tendons, and joints that…
- Saccade (Saccadic Eye Movement)
- A rapid, ballistic eye movement that shifts the point of gaze from one fixation location to another. Saccades typically last 20 to 200 milliseconds, and visual processing is largely suppressed during …
- Semantic Listening
- A mode of listening, identified by composer and theorist Pierre Schaeffer, in which the listener focuses on decoding a coded audio signal to arrive at its intended message — for example, understanding…
- Sensory Compensation (Cross-Modal Plasticity, Sensory Substitution)
- The phenomenon whereby the loss of one sense leads to enhanced abilities in remaining senses, driven by neuro-plasticity — the brain's capacity to reorganise its neural pathways. Research shows that b…
- Sensory Processing (Sensory Integration, Sensory Processing Differences)
- Sensory processing refers to the way the nervous system receives, organizes, and responds to sensory input from the environment, including sound, light, touch, smell, taste, and movement. When sensory…
- Simulator Sickness (VR Sickness, Cybersickness, Motion Sickness in VR)
- A form of motion sickness experienced in virtual reality caused by a mismatch between visual perception of movement and the vestibular system's sense of physical motion. Symptoms include nausea, dizzi…
- Skilled Vision (Vernacular Vision, Professional Vision)
- Skilled vision is a concept from visual culture and anthropology that describes the process of learning to see and interpret visual information in specialized ways within a particular community of pra…
- Sound Awareness (Sound Awareness Technology, Environmental Sound Awareness)
- The ability to perceive, identify, and respond to sounds in one's environment, and the assistive technologies designed to support this ability for Deaf and hard of hearing individuals. Sound awareness…
- Speech Reading (Lip Reading, Lipreading, Visual Speech Perception)
- The practice of understanding speech by visually interpreting a speaker's lip movements, facial expressions, gestures, and body language. Speech reading is used by many Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing indivi…
- Speechreading (Lipreading, Lip Reading)
- A communication method that relies on observing visual and contextual cues, primarily the movements of a speakers lips, face, and body, to understand spoken language. Speechreading is used by many d/D…
- Tactile Accuracy
- Tactile accuracy is an evaluation criterion for measuring how well a person perceives the shape information of an object in a tactile image through touch. Unlike "naming accuracy" (whether someone can…
- Tactile Acuity (Touch Acuity, Tactile Resolution)
- The ability to perceive and discriminate fine spatial details through the sense of touch, analogous to visual acuity for sight. Tactile acuity varies across body regions, with fingertips having the hi…