Glossary

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Semantic Accessibility

An approach to web accessibility that focuses on the predictability and consistency of user interface behavior, layout, and interaction patterns rather than the underlying code. Semantic accessibility ensures that similar elements appear in the same locations across pages, menus…

Sensory Accessibility

The design of environments, technologies, and experiences to accommodate people with diverse sensory processing needs, including those with heightened or reduced sensitivity to sound, light, touch, smell, or movement. Sensory accessibility extends beyond traditional visual and…

Sighted Bias(also: Visual Bias, Ocularcentrism)

The tendency in technology design to privilege sighted ways of perceiving and understanding the world, often unconsciously centering visual sensibilities in interfaces, descriptions, and assessment criteria. In accessibility contexts, sighted bias manifests when designers create…

Sighted-Centric Design(also: Vision-Centric Design)

Design approaches and practices that privilege sighted sensemaking and marginalize blind and non-visual ways of relating to the world. Sighted-centered design produces technologies, interfaces, and descriptive standards that assume visual perception as the default mode of…

Situational Disability(also: Situational Impairment, Contextual Disability)

A temporary limitation in ability caused by environmental circumstances rather than a permanent condition. Examples include being unable to read a screen in bright sunlight (visual), not hearing audio in a noisy environment (auditory), being unable to use two hands while…

Situationally-Induced Impairments and Disabilities(also: SIIDs, Situationally Induced Impairments and Disabilities, Situation-Induced Disabilities)

An accessibility framework, introduced by Sears et al., that describes how everyday environments and tasks can temporarily impose the same kinds of barriers on non-disabled users that permanent impairments create for disabled users. Examples include reading a phone in bright sun…

Skeuomorphic Design(also: Skeuomorphism)

A design approach in which digital interface elements are made to resemble their real-world physical counterparts in appearance and behavior. For example, a digital notepad might have lined paper texture and a spiral binding, or a file folder icon might open with a tab-dragging…

Spatial Assessment(also: Spatial Descriptor)

The use of spatial attributes such as distance, dimensions, and location to describe objects in a visual scene. Research with blind users has found that spatial assessment descriptors are problematic because they rely on sighted language and assumptions — distance is relative to…

Syntactic Accessibility(also: Technical Accessibility)

The dimension of web accessibility concerned with the correctness of code sent to the browser and assistive technologies. Syntactic accessibility focuses on whether HTML markup, ARIA attributes, and other technical elements conform to standards so that content can be properly…

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