Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
6660 terms — page 19 of 333
- Administrative Burden (Bureaucratic Burden, Process Burden)
- The cumulative effort, time, stress, and negative impacts that result from navigating administrative processes such as applying for benefits, gaining medical evidence, completing forms, and interactin…
- Adobe Acrobat (Acrobat Pro, Adobe Acrobat Pro, Acrobat DC)
- Adobe's commercial software suite for creating, editing, and managing PDF documents, including accessibility remediation features. Acrobat Pro includes tools for adding tags to PDF documents, setting …
- Adobe Flash (Flash Player, Flash, Macromedia Flash, SWF)
- A discontinued multimedia software platform formerly used to create animations, rich internet applications, games, and video players embedded in web pages. Flash content was notoriously inaccessible t…
- Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS, ASRS-v1.1, Adult ADHD Self-Rating Scale)
- A short self-report screening instrument for adult Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder developed by the World Health Organization in collaboration with researchers from Harvard Medical School. Th…
- Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS)
- A family of in-vehicle technologies that partially automate driving tasks — adaptive cruise control, lane-keeping, automatic emergency braking, parking assistance, blind-spot monitoring — while a huma…
- Adventitious blindness (Acquired blindness, Late blindness, Acquired visual impairment)
- Vision loss that occurs after a period of sighted experience, as opposed to congenital blindness (present from birth). People with adventitious blindness retain visual memories, mental imagery, and fa…
- 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…
- Advocacy Labor (Accessibility Advocacy Labor, Corrective Labor)
- The unpaid effort that disabled people must expend to correct biased, ableist, or inaccessible technology outputs and advocate for better representations of disability. In the context of generative AI…
- Aesthetic Blindness
- Aesthetic blindness is a myth and misconception rooted in ableism that assumes blind people cannot perceive, appreciate, or create beauty because beauty is rendered solely through visual means. This a…
- Aesthetic Experience (Aesthetic Need, Aesthetic Accessibility)
- The emotional, sensory, and imaginative enjoyment people derive from environments, art, media, and everyday scenes - distinct from functional or task-oriented information. Aesthetic accessibility argu…
- Aesthetic Feedback (Visual Aesthetic Feedback)
- Information provided to a user about the aesthetic qualities of visual content, such as clarity, framing, color balance, mood, lighting, and overall style. For blind creators, aesthetic feedback from …
- Affective Captions (Affective Captioning, Emotive Captions)
- Captions that convey not only the spoken words but also the emotional qualities of speech — such as valence (positive vs. negative tone) and arousal (intensity) — typically through typographic modulat…
- Affective Computing (Emotion AI, Emotional AI)
- A field of AI that attempts to detect, interpret, and simulate human emotions using technologies such as facial expression analysis, voice tone detection, physiological sensors, and behavioral pattern…
- Affective Congruency
- The degree to which a system's sensory outputs, interactions, and feedback align emotionally with the user's current affective state and the emotional meaning the user attaches to the experience. Dist…
- Affective Engagement (Emotional Engagement)
- The emotional connection and investment a user develops with a task, activity, or technology. In accessibility and therapeutic contexts, affective engagement goes beyond usability to encompass motivat…
- Affective Haptics (Emotional Haptics)
- A subfield of haptic interaction design concerned with using tactile and kinaesthetic feedback — vibration, pressure, temperature, squeezing, stroking, heartbeat-like pulsation — to communicate, evoke…
- Affective Lability (Mood Lability, Emotional Lability)
- A pattern of rapid, unpredictable shifts in emotional state, often involving intense fluctuations between positive and negative moods with minimal external provocation. Affective lability is commonly …
- Affective Touch (Social Touch, Emotional Touch)
- The emotional and social dimension of touch, distinct from discriminative touch that identifies object properties. Affective touch is mediated primarily by C-tactile (CT) afferents in hairy skin and p…
- Affinity Diagram (Affinity Diagramming, KJ Method)
- A collaborative analysis method where team members organise large amounts of data — such as user research findings, design ideas, or usability issues — by writing individual items on sticky notes and …
- Affinity Diagramming (Affinity Mapping, KJ Method)
- A qualitative data analysis and design method where researchers or team members organize individual data points (observations, quotes, ideas) into groups based on natural relationships and themes. In …