Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
27 results found in principles.
- Ableism (Disability discrimination, Disablism)
- Discrimination, prejudice, or social bias against people with disabilities, rooted in the assumption that typical abilities are superior and that disabled people need to be fixed or are inherently les…
- Access labour (Access labor, Disability labour, Accommodation labour)
- The additional physical, cognitive, and emotional work that disabled people must perform to navigate inaccessible environments, systems, and social situations. This includes researching whether venues…
- Adaptable system
- A system that can be configured using prior knowledge before use, as opposed to an adaptive system which changes dynamically during use. In accessibility, adaptable systems allow users or administrato…
- Assent (Informed assent, Child assent)
- A participant's affirmative agreement to take part in research, used when the individual cannot legally provide informed consent — most commonly children or people with certain cognitive disabilities.…
- Audism
- Systemic discrimination and prejudice against deaf and hard of hearing people, rooted in the belief that hearing and spoken language are inherently superior to deafness and sign language. Coined by To…
- Cognitive accessibility (Cognitive a11y, COGA)
- The practice of designing digital content, interfaces, and interactions so they are usable by people with cognitive, learning, and neurological disabilities, including conditions such as dementia, int…
- Cognitive load (Mental load, Cognitive burden, Cognitive demand)
- The total amount of mental effort required to complete a task, encompassing the processing of information, decision-making, remembering instructions, and managing attention. Cognitive load theory, dev…
- Collective access (Collective communication access)
- A disability justice concept that frames accessibility as a shared, relational practice created by a group rather than an individual accommodation delivered to one person. In contrast to traditional m…
- Crip technoscience (Crip tech, Critical disability technoscience)
- A framework from disability studies, articulated by Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, that positions disabled people as expert knowledge-makers and innovative technologists rather than passive recipient…
- DeafSpace (Deaf Space, Deaf architecture)
- A set of architectural and environmental design principles developed by architect Hansel Bauman in collaboration with the Deaf community at Gallaudet University, grounded in the sensory and spatial ex…
- Design space (Interaction modality)
- A medium, physical or abstract, through which a user and a device exchange information. The visual design space uses sight (screens, displays), the sonic design space uses hearing (speech, earcons, mu…
- Design space properties
- The characteristics of information within a design space, classified by the type of cognitive processing they require. Direct properties relate to perception and automatic processing — colour, brightn…
- Design space structure
- A framework characterising how raw information is organised within a design space. Nesbitt classifies information conveyed through sensory channels as nominal (categorical, such as labels), quantitati…
- Digital accessibility for ageing (Age-related accessibility, Accessible ageing, Senior accessibility)
- The practice of designing digital technologies that remain usable as people experience age-related changes in vision (presbyopia, contrast sensitivity loss, cataracts), hearing (presbycusis), motor co…
- Disability justice (DJ)
- An activist framework developed by disabled queer people of colour — notably Sins Invalid, Mia Mingus, and Patty Berne — that centres the experiences of those at the intersection of disability and oth…
- Dramaturgical framework (Dramaturgy, Goffman's dramaturgy, Impression management)
- A sociological framework developed by Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956) that analyses social interaction as a theatrical performance. The framework distinguishes betwe…
- Fidelity
- An expression of how accurately a representation reproduces its source. A photograph is a high-fidelity visual representation of a scene but loses depth, sound, and smell. In accessibility and content…
- Functional accessibility
- The degree to which a device or interface is usable by a specific user or user profile, either directly or through the addition of assistive technology. A system is functionally accessible for a given…
- ICF (International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health)
- A framework developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and endorsed by all 191 member states in 2001 for describing and measuring health and disability. The ICF takes a biopsychosocial approach,…
- Intrinsic accessibility
- A property of a user interface whose underlying architecture inherently supports adaptation across a broad range of user capabilities, as distinct from functional accessibility which addresses specifi…