Middleware

Software that acts as an intermediary layer between different applications, services, or components, enabling them to communicate and share data despite being built with different technologies, protocols, or programming languages. In the context of accessibility, middleware is particularly important for integrating assistive technology components — such as speech recognition engines, text-to-speech systems, computer vision libraries, and gesture recognizers — with mainstream applications like web browsers. Middleware abstracts away the technical incompatibilities between these diverse components, allowing developers to combine existing partial solutions into comprehensive accessibility solutions without requiring changes to the underlying software.