Glossary

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Accessibility Commons(also: AC Repository, AC Metadata Repository)

A shared metadata repository and schema proposed in 2008 by IBM, the University of Washington, Stony Brook University, and the University of Manchester to let accessibility-remediation research projects publish and reuse externally authored fixes for inaccessible web content. An…

Amazon Mechanical Turk(also: AMT, MTurk, Mechanical Turk)

A crowdsourcing marketplace operated by Amazon that enables individuals and businesses to distribute tasks (called Human Intelligence Tasks or HITs) to a distributed workforce who complete them remotely for small payments. AMT has been widely used in HCI and accessibility…

Annotation(also: Web Annotation, Content Annotation)

The practice of adding supplementary information, notes, or metadata to existing digital content, typically without modifying the original source. In accessibility, annotation is used to add alternative descriptions, labels, structural information, or other accessibility…

Assistive Services(also: Crowdsourced Assistive Services, Human-powered Accessibility Services)

On-demand services that pair people with disabilities with remote human helpers, often via crowdsourcing or a dedicated responder network, to answer accessibility questions or perform small assistive tasks. Examples include visual-question-answering tools for people who are…

Citizen Science(also: Community Science, Participatory Science)

Citizen science is a research approach that engages non-expert members of the public in collecting, processing, or analyzing scientific data, often through purpose-built interactive tools and platforms. In accessibility contexts, citizen science methods have been applied to…

Citizen Sensing(also: Citizen Sensor, Participatory Sensing)

A data collection approach in which members of the public use mobile devices or other tools to gather and report information about their environment, contributing to collective datasets that can inform decision-making. In accessibility contexts, citizen sensing enables people to…

Collaborative Accessibility Authoring(also: Collaborative Authoring, Crowdsourced Accessibility)

An approach to web accessibility in which a community of volunteers collaboratively creates, maintains, and shares accessibility fixes for websites they do not own or control. Rather than relying solely on site owners to make their content accessible, collaborative authoring…

Community Sourcing(also: Community-Driven Accessibility)

An approach to creating accessible content by drawing on community members who have domain expertise or vested interest in the content, rather than relying on professional describers or general crowdworkers. Unlike crowdsourcing, which draws from a broad pool of workers who may…

Community-sourcing(also: Community Sourcing, Community-contributed Data)

A data collection approach where members of a specific community contribute information based on their direct experience and local knowledge, as distinct from general crowdsourcing which draws on anonymous, unrelated workers. In accessibility contexts, community-sourcing…

Crowd Accessibility(also: Crowdsourcing for Accessibility, Human-Powered Access Technology)

An approach that combines human intelligence with machine intelligence to create accessible content and services for people with disabilities. In crowd accessibility, micro-tasks that automated systems cannot yet perform reliably — such as describing images, identifying objects,…

Crowdsourced Accessibility(also: Crowdsourced Accessibility Auditing, Citizen-Sourced Accessibility)

The practice of collecting accessibility information about physical or digital environments through contributions from large numbers of people, rather than relying solely on professional auditors. In the physical accessibility context, crowdsourcing approaches include virtual…

Crowdsourced Accessibility Mapping(also: Collaborative Accessibility Mapping, Citizen-Sourced Accessibility Data)

The practice of using contributions from members of the public to identify, report, and map accessibility barriers and features in physical or digital environments. In urban contexts, crowdsourced accessibility mapping typically involves mobile applications that allow citizens…

Crowdsourced Captioning(also: Crowd Captioning, Collaborative Captioning)

Crowdsourced captioning is an approach to creating video captions or subtitles by distributing the work across multiple contributors rather than relying on a single professional captionist. This method can leverage diverse workers with varying language skills, hearing abilities,…

Curation(also: Content Curation, Accessibility Curation)

The process of selecting, organizing, and presenting digital content or resources to serve a particular audience or purpose. In accessibility contexts, curation refers to the proactive work of identifying web content that presents barriers and creating alternative, accessible…

Digital Labor(also: Digital Labour, Online Labor)

Work performed through digital platforms and online systems, including microtask crowdwork, gig economy jobs, and remote freelancing. Digital labor raises important accessibility considerations because it can offer people with disabilities flexible employment opportunities that…

Distributed Proofreaders(also: DP, PGDP)

A long-running volunteer crowdsourcing initiative, founded in 2000, that proofreads OCR output for Project Gutenberg using a side-by-side web interface showing the scanned page image and the extracted text. Distributed Proofreaders has been credited with accelerating Project…

ESP Game(also: Extra Sensory Perception Game)

A human computation game, created by Luis von Ahn, in which two randomly paired online players are shown the same image and independently type words to describe it, earning points when their labels match. The ESP Game was designed to generate accurate, human-validated labels for…

Friendsourcing

A practice where people with disabilities turn to friends, family members, or social network contacts to obtain assistance with accessibility-related tasks, such as describing images, identifying objects, or verifying visual information. Unlike crowdsourcing from strangers,…

Gamification

The application of game design elements — such as points, rewards, competition, collection mechanics, and progress tracking — in non-game contexts to increase engagement and motivation. In accessibility work, gamification has been used to encourage people to contribute…

Gamification(also: Games with a Purpose, GWAP)

The application of game design elements — such as points, levels, leaderboards, and time challenges — to non-game tasks in order to increase engagement and motivation. In accessibility, gamification has been used to crowdsource tasks that are difficult to automate, such as…

Human Computation

A computing paradigm in which humans perform tasks that computers cannot yet do reliably, often embedded within systems that combine human and machine capabilities. The classic example is reCAPTCHA, which used human text recognition to digitise books while verifying users were…

Human Computation(also: Crowdsourced Computing)

A computational approach that harnesses human intelligence to perform tasks that computers cannot easily accomplish alone. In accessibility contexts, human computation powers services like remote sighted assistance for blind users, crowd-powered captioning to improve ASR…

Human Intelligence Task(also: HIT)

A unit of work on a crowdsourcing platform, particularly Amazon Mechanical Turk, that requires human judgment to complete. HITs typically involve tasks that are difficult for computers but straightforward for humans, such as image labeling, transcription, content moderation, or…

Human-Powered Accessibility(also: Human Computation for Accessibility, Crowd-Powered Assistive Technology)

An approach to assistive technology that uses remote human workers — whether paid crowdworkers, volunteers, or trained agents — to provide accessibility services that automated systems cannot yet deliver reliably. Examples include providing real-time visual descriptions for…

Image Obfuscation(also: Image Masking, Visual Privacy Protection)

Techniques applied to images to obscure or remove sensitive visual information before sharing or processing, such as blurring, pixelation, edge filtering, or masking regions of an image. In accessibility contexts, image obfuscation is important for privacy-preserving assistive…

Iterative Crowdsourcing(also: Iterative Human Computation, Multi-Round Crowdsourcing)

A human computation workflow in which multiple rounds of crowd workers build iteratively upon each other's responses to collectively achieve higher quality results than any individual worker could produce alone. In each iteration, workers are shown the previous round's outputs…

Legion:Scribe(also: Scribe, Legion Scribe)

A crowd captioning system developed at the University of Rochester that enables multiple non-expert typists to collectively produce real-time captions by simultaneously typing partial transcriptions of speech, which are then automatically aligned and merged into a single…

Micro-task(also: Microtask, HIT, Human Intelligence Task)

A small, self-contained unit of work that can be completed independently, typically in seconds to minutes, often distributed through crowdsourcing platforms. In accessibility contexts, micro-tasks such as image description, transcription, and content tagging are commonly used…

Passive Accessibility Sensing(also: Automatic Barrier Detection, Breadcrumb Sensing)

A data collection approach that uses smartphone sensors (GPS, accelerometers, gyroscopes) to automatically detect potential accessibility barriers in the physical environment without requiring active user input. By analysing patterns in pedestrian movement data — such as…

Physical Crowdsourcing(also: Spatial Crowdsourcing, Physical World Crowdsourcing)

A form of crowdsourcing in which tasks require participants to perform actions in the physical world rather than completing digital tasks online. In an accessibility context, physical crowdsourcing has been applied to installing and maintaining navigation infrastructure such as…

Project Sidewalk

An open-source web-based crowdsourcing tool developed at the University of Washington that enables volunteers to virtually audit sidewalk accessibility using Google Street View panoramas. Contributors label four types of accessibility features and problems: curb ramps, missing…

Social Microvolunteering(also: Intermediated Friendsourcing)

A form of online volunteering in which a person installs an application that posts small tasks (microtasks) to their social media feed on behalf of a cause or organization, enabling their friends and followers to contribute by completing these tasks within the social platform…

Social-purpose Crowdsourcing(also: Social-good Crowdsourcing, Altruistic Crowdsourcing)

Crowdsourcing aimed at achieving a social or public-benefit goal rather than producing paid labour or commercial output. Examples include volunteer proofreading for accessible-book libraries, crowdsourced captioning, alternative-text generation, OCR error correction for…

Trove

An online discovery service operated by the National Library of Australia that aggregates digitised books, newspapers, images, archives, and other cultural-heritage content, with integrated OCR-error correction tools. Trove is frequently cited in accessibility and crowdsourcing…

Virtual Auditing(also: Remote Auditing, Virtual Accessibility Audit)

Virtual auditing is a method of assessing the accessibility of physical environments by remotely examining street-level imagery, such as Google Street View, rather than conducting in-person inspections. Research has shown that tool-mediated virtual audits of urban infrastructure…

Volunteered Geographic Information(also: VGI, Citizen-Generated Geospatial Data)

Geographic information voluntarily created and shared by citizens, often using GPS-enabled smartphones, mapping tools, and online platforms. VGI enables large-scale collection of spatial data at low cost through citizen participation. In accessibility contexts, VGI includes…

reCAPTCHA

A CAPTCHA system originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University (and later acquired by Google) that repurposes human effort spent proving they are not robots into useful work such as digitising scanned books or labelling images for machine learning. reCAPTCHA is a frequently…

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