Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
6660 terms — page 315 of 333
- Visual Affordance (Visual Affordances)
- A visually conveyed cue that signals how an object can be used or what it represents - for example, a handle suggesting 'grasp', a button suggesting 'press', or color and labeling suggesting product i…
- Visual Assistance Technology (VAT, Visual Aid App)
- Mobile applications and devices that take videos or images as input and provide verbal, haptic, or other non-visual output to help blind and low vision people access visual information. VAT can be hum…
- Visual Assistant (Visual Assistant Skill)
- Proposed by Gonzalez Penuela et al. (2026), the 'visual assistant' skill is a set of behaviours that an AI visual interpretation system must exhibit — beyond simply producing accurate captions — to me…
- Visual Attention (Attentional Allocation, Gaze Behaviour)
- The cognitive process of selectively focusing on specific parts of the visual field while filtering out other information. Visual attention determines which elements in a scene or interface a person n…
- Visual Attention Span (VAS, Visual Attention Window)
- The number of distinct visual elements that can be processed simultaneously in a single glance. Visual attention span is a cognitive capacity linked to reading ability — when reading, the eyes fixate …
- Visual Attention Split (Split Attention, Divided Visual Attention)
- The cognitive challenge of needing to divide visual focus between two or more sources of information simultaneously. For deaf and hard of hearing people, visual attention split is a pervasive accessib…
- Visual Augmentation (Text Augmentation, Visual Enhancement)
- The addition of visual elements such as icons, images, sign language videos, or highlights to text to aid comprehension and reading support. Visual augmentation is a common reading support strategy ac…
- Visual Clutter (Visual Noise, Visual Complexity)
- An excess of visual elements in an environment or interface that makes it difficult to locate, identify, or focus on relevant information. Visual clutter is a significant barrier for people with cereb…
- Visual Cognition (Visual Processing, Visual Perception)
- The set of mental processes involved in perceiving, interpreting, and responding to visual information, including object recognition, spatial awareness, motion detection, and visual attention allocati…
- Visual Communication (VIC)
- A method of conveying information, ideas, and meaning through visual elements such as images, icons, symbols, and pictographs rather than through spoken or written language. In accessibility contexts,…
- Visual Context Switching (Visual Attention Switching, Gaze Switching)
- The act of shifting visual focus between multiple sources of information, such as between a sign language interpreter and a presentation screen, or between captions and a speaker's face. For deaf and …
- Visual Crowding (Crowding)
- A perceptual phenomenon in which the presence of nearby flanking characters or objects makes it harder to recognise a target character, especially in peripheral vision or when the target is small, low…
- Visual Data Exploration (VDE, data visualization exploration)
- Visual data exploration is the interactive process of examining datasets through graphical representations such as charts, maps, and dashboards to discover patterns, trends, and anomalies. Accessibili…
- Visual Description (Visual Content Description)
- The practice of conveying visual information through non-visual means, primarily text or speech. Visual description encompasses various contexts including image descriptions, alternative text, audio d…
- Visual Descriptor (Visual Cue, Visual Doneness Indicator)
- A description in instructions or content that relies on visual appearance to convey information, such as "cook until golden brown," "the mixture should be translucent," or "form into patties." Visual …
- Visual Dialogue (Visual Dialog, VisDial)
- Visual dialogue is an AI task that involves holding a multi-turn natural language conversation about visual content such as an image or video frame. Unlike single-turn visual question answering (VQA),…
- Visual Dispersion (Visual Attention Splitting, Gaze Switching)
- The challenge faced by deaf and hard of hearing individuals when they must divide their visual attention between multiple simultaneous information sources, such as a speech-to-text display, presentati…
- Visual Distraction (Visual Clutter, Visual Noise)
- Visual elements in an interface or content that draw attention away from the primary content or task, including animated advertisements, moving backgrounds, decorative overlays, notification badges, r…
- Visual Document Understanding (VDU, Document Understanding)
- A field of AI research focused on the interpretation and analysis of visually-rich digital documents such as forms, tables, menus, reports, receipts, and academic papers. Visual document understanding…
- Visual Epistemology (Sighted Epistemology)
- Ways of knowing and understanding the world that are dependent on visual perception. Visual epistemology treats sight as the primary and most reliable sense for gathering information, often positionin…