Glossary

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AI Fairness(also: Algorithmic Fairness, Fair AI)

The principle that AI systems should not create or reinforce unfair bias against particular groups. Standard AI fairness frameworks primarily address race and gender but are increasingly recognized as inadequate for disability, because disability is often invisible,…

AI ethics(also: Artificial intelligence ethics, Machine learning ethics)

The field concerned with ensuring that artificial intelligence systems are developed and deployed in ways that are fair, transparent, accountable, and respectful of human rights. In accessibility contexts, AI ethics addresses concerns about algorithmic bias that may disadvantage…

Ability-Mediating Design

A design framework introduced by Radu-Daniel Vatavu that focuses on how interactive systems mediate and reshape users' abilities rather than adapting to fixed abilities. Its core principles are mediation (systems empower users with enhanced skills), world coverage (systems…

Academic Accessibility(also: Accessibility in academia, Scholarly accessibility)

The degree to which the tools, publications, venues, and institutional practices of academic research and higher education are usable by disabled students, faculty, and researchers. Academic accessibility spans scholarly PDFs and figures, reference and qualitative-analysis…

Academic Accommodations(also: Educational Accommodations, Disability Accommodations)

Modifications to academic requirements, environments, or procedures provided to students with disabilities to ensure equal access to education. Common accommodations include extended test time, note-taking services, priority seating, alternative format materials, and reduced…

Access Barrier(also: Accessibility Barrier, Barrier to Access)

Any obstacle that prevents or diminishes a disabled person's ability to complete a task, participate in an activity, or access information. Access barriers are not limited to complete inability (failure points) but also include situations where tasks can be completed but with…

Accessibility Bug Report(also: ABR, Accessibility Defect Report)

A bug report that specifically documents an accessibility barrier or failure in software. These reports describe issues that prevent or hinder people with disabilities from using an application, such as missing alternative text, unlabeled form controls, keyboard navigation…

Accessibility Checker(also: Accessibility Verifier, Accessibility Inspector, A11y Checker)

A software tool that automatically evaluates an application, document, or website against accessibility standards and guidelines, identifying potential barriers for users with disabilities. Accessibility checkers may be built into development environments (such as Apple's…

Accessibility Dongle(also: Disability Dongle)

A well-intentioned but ultimately useless or impractical solution to an accessibility problem that disabled people never actually needed or asked for. Coined by Liz Jackson in 2019, the term critiques designs created without meaningful input from the disability community — often…

Accessibility Remediation(also: A11y Remediation, Accessibility Repair)

The process of identifying and fixing accessibility barriers in digital products such as websites, mobile applications, or documents to bring them into compliance with accessibility standards and make them usable by people with disabilities. Remediation may involve modifying…

Accessible Gesture Interaction(also: Inclusive Gesture Design)

The design and implementation of gesture-based interactions that can be effectively used by people with diverse abilities, including those with motor impairments, visual disabilities, or conditions such as tremor, spasm, or limited range of motion. Accessible gesture interaction…

Accessible Web Design(also: Accessible Web Authoring, Nonvisual Web Design)

Accessible web design refers both to the practice of designing webpages that meet accessibility standards (such as WCAG) and — in a second, increasingly important sense — to the practice of enabling people with disabilities to act as web designers themselves, not just as testers…

Accommodation Letter(also: Letter of Accommodation, LOA, Faculty Notification Letter)

A formal document produced by a university's disability services office that notifies faculty of their obligation to provide specific approved accommodations to a student with a disability. The letter details the accommodations but does not disclose the student's specific…

Adaptive Sports(also: Para Sports, Disability Sports, Adapted Sports)

Sports that have been modified or specifically designed to enable participation by people with disabilities, including modifications to rules, equipment, or playing environments. Adaptive sports range from wheelchair versions of mainstream sports (basketball, rugby, tennis) to…

Affirmative Consent(also: Yes Means Yes)

A consent model that requires explicit, active agreement to an action - typically framed as 'yes means yes' rather than the absence of refusal. Originating in sexual-violence prevention and adopted in HCI work on consent technology, affirmative consent emphasises that silence,…

AgeTech(also: Age tech, Technology for older adults)

A broad category of technology designed to support older adults in aging well, living independently, and managing age-related health conditions. AgeTech spans smart-home monitoring, voice assistants, medication reminders, fall-detection wearables, social companion robots,…

Algorithmic Bias(also: AI Bias, Machine Learning Bias)

Systematic and unfair discrimination embedded in the outputs of algorithmic systems, arising from biased training data, flawed model design, or unrepresentative development processes. For people with disabilities, algorithmic bias manifests in multiple ways: voice assistants…

Algorithmic Harm(also: AI Harm, Algorithmic Negative Outcome)

Any difficulty, disadvantage, or injury caused by the use of AI-driven systems, ranging from mere inconvenience to material harm. For people with disabilities, documented algorithmic harms include denial of vital resources (welfare benefits, employment, housing, education),…

Asynchronous Learning(also: Asynchronous Instruction)

A mode of education in which learners engage with instructional content on their own schedule rather than in real time with an instructor, typically via pre-recorded videos, written materials, or interactive modules. For accessibility, asynchronous learning removes some barriers…

Audio Customization(also: Audio Control, Sound Customization)

The ability for users to modify the audio characteristics of media content, including removing background sounds, enhancing speech clarity, adjusting volume levels for different audio channels, and controlling audio effects. Audio customization for accessibility goes beyond…

Audio Denoising(also: Noise Removal, Audio Noise Reduction)

The process of removing unwanted background sounds, noise, or audio artifacts from an audio signal while preserving the primary content (typically speech). In video accessibility for ADHD, audio denoising removes background music, sound effects, environmental sounds, and other…

Auditory Menu(also: Audio Menu, Speaking Menu)

A user interface menu that conveys its content and structure through audio rather than visual display. Auditory menus typically use text-to-speech to read menu item names and may incorporate non-speech sounds such as earcons, spearcons, or tones to provide contextual information…

Auto-Generated Captions(also: Automatic Captions, AI Captions, Machine-Generated Captions)

Captions automatically created by speech recognition technology without human review or editing. Video platforms like YouTube and TikTok offer auto-generated captions as a default accessibility feature. While they improve baseline accessibility, auto-generated captions often…

Auxiliary Removal(also: Overlay Removal, Non-Essential Element Removal)

A video layout customization option that removes visual elements not directly related to the core video content, such as watermarks, logos, banners, breaking-news tickers, subscription prompts, and other overlays. Auxiliary Removal was the most popular layout customization…

Beepball(also: Beep Baseball, Blind Baseball)

An adaptive version of baseball designed for players who are blind or visually impaired. The game uses a softball modified with a sound sensor that emits a beeping sound, and bases that buzz when activated, allowing players to locate the ball and bases through auditory cues. All…

Blind Sports(also: Visually Impaired Sports)

Athletic activities designed for or adapted to enable participation by people who are blind or have low vision. These sports rely on non-visual cues, particularly sound, to make gameplay accessible — for example, blind hockey uses a puck with ball bearings inside to produce…

Bodymind

A concept from disability studies, introduced by Margaret Price and widely adopted by disability scholars and activists, referring to the inseparable integration of body and mind as a single entity. The term rejects the Cartesian dualism that separates physical and mental…

Bodymind Barrier(also: Bodymind Access Barrier)

A type of access barrier where performing a task leads to an undesirable physical or mental state, such as pain, fatigue, nausea, dizziness, anxiety, or sensory overload. The task may be technically completable without distress, but existing approaches cause the person's…

Borne-Accessible Document(also: born-accessible, natively accessible document)

A document that is created accessibly from the outset—its semantic structure, headings, alt text, and tags are built in at authoring time rather than added later through remediation. Borne-accessible PDFs come out of authoring tools (e.g., Microsoft Word, LaTeX with…

Braille Music Notation(also: Braille Music, Braille Music Code)

A tactile system for representing musical notation using the six-dot braille cell, encoding pitch, duration, dynamics, and other musical information for blind and visually impaired musicians. Unlike standard visual music notation which is two-dimensional (horizontal for time,…

CVAA(also: Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act)

The 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, enacted in the United States in 2010 and updated in 2020, which requires major broadcast and cable networks to make online video content accessible through the provision of audio descriptions and closed captions. The…

Captions(also: Subtitles, Text Captions)

Text displayed on screen that represents the audio content of a video, including spoken dialogue and important sound effects. Captions are essential for deaf and hard of hearing viewers but also benefit people with ADHD (providing a second modality for processing information),…

Closed Captions(also: CC)

Captions that can be turned on or off by the viewer, as opposed to open captions which are permanently embedded in the video. Closed captions typically include not just dialogue but also descriptions of relevant non-speech audio like music, sound effects, and speaker…

Cognitive Accessibility(also: Cognitive A11y)

The practice of designing digital content and interfaces to be usable by people with cognitive, intellectual, learning, and neurological disabilities. Cognitive accessibility addresses barriers related to attention, memory, problem-solving, comprehension, and executive function.…

Collective Communication Access(also: CCA)

A framework developed by McDonnell et al. (2023) that reconceptualises communication access as a shared, co-constructed practice distributed across everyone involved in an interaction, rather than as an individual accommodation provided to disabled participants. CCA argues that…

Color Vision Deficiency(also: Color Blindness, CVD, Colour Blindness)

A condition in which a person has difficulty distinguishing between certain colors, most commonly red and green (deuteranopia/protanopia), but also blue and yellow (tritanopia) or all colors (achromatopsia). Color vision deficiency affects approximately 8% of males and 0.5% of…

Combination Repertoire

A type of technology repertoire where multiple tools work together simultaneously to provide access for a single task. For example, a person who is deaf and hard of hearing might use automatic captions, Bluetooth hearing aids, and good lighting together during in-person…

Community-Driven Accessibility(also: Crowdsourced Accessibility, Peer-Driven Accessibility)

Accessibility improvements initiated and maintained by community members rather than platform operators or content creators. Examples include viewers adding timestamps and chapter breakdowns in video comments, community members providing alternative text descriptions, users…

Computer-Using Agent(also: CUA)

An AI agent, typically built on a Large Multimodal Model, that perceives a computer's graphical user interface through screenshots, reasons about on-screen context, and directly manipulates the interface by clicking, typing, scrolling, and navigating between applications. Unlike…

Consent(also: Informed Consent)

Voluntary, informed, and revocable agreement by a person to a particular action or interaction involving them - whether that is sexual activity, data collection, medical treatment, research participation, or interaction with an automated system. In accessibility contexts,…

Consent Model(also: Consent Framework)

A prescriptive framework specifying how consent should be requested, given, sustained, and revoked in a particular interaction context. Examples include affirmative consent (explicit verbal agreement), embodied consent (drawing on bodily and somatic cues), and haptic consent…

Consequence Calculus

The decision-making process by which disabled individuals weigh all available options for addressing an access barrier and select the option that best matches their priorities given their contextual factors. Consequence calculus involves evaluating trade-offs across multiple…

Consequence-Based Accessibility

A framework introduced by Mack and McDonnell that describes how people with chronic illnesses experience access barriers where the consequences of their actions, rather than the nature of the task itself, make something inaccessible. For example, a person may be physically…

Content Focus(also: Content Focus Mode, Presentation Focus)

A video layout customization option that enlarges and centers the primary visual content being discussed—such as presentation slides, demonstrations, or graphical illustrations—while removing or minimizing other visual elements like the speaker and auxiliary overlays. Content…

Content Quality(also: Information Quality)

The accuracy, reliability, completeness, and trustworthiness of information presented in digital content. For health-related and disability-related content on social media and video platforms, content quality is a critical concern because misinformation can lead to harmful…

Content Wants(also: Information Wants, Content Preferences)

The specific types of information that a user desires or needs from a piece of content, as opposed to information needs imposed by an external system or standard. In image accessibility research, content wants refer to the particular visual elements (objects, people,…

Context-Aware(also: Context-Aware Design, Context-Sensitive)

An approach to designing systems, content, or interfaces that adapt their behavior or output based on the context in which they are used, including the user's goals, the platform or source where content appears, environmental conditions, and user preferences. In accessibility,…

Contextual Factors

The characteristics of a person, their tools, or their environment that influence experiences of access or inaccessibility. Contextual factors include identity-related factors (race, gender, class, age, language, religion, sexuality, body size), social contexts (who one is…

Data Physicalization(also: Physical Data Visualization)

The practice of representing data through physical, tangible objects rather than on-screen visualizations. Data physicalizations encode information in the shape, texture, size, weight, or other physical properties of objects, making data accessible through touch and spatial…

Deaf Tech(also: Deaf-Centered Technology)

A framework and design orientation for technologies created by, with, and centering Deaf communities. Deaf Tech emphasizes participatory design, cultural relevance, and alignment with Deaf epistemologies and practices, rather than positioning Deaf users as end-consumers of…