Glossary
Terms used in accessibility research and practice. Each entry has a definition, common aliases, and category tags.
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- Eligibility Theatre
- A term coined by Curtis et al. (2026) to describe the performance of visible, narrowly-framed disability that claimants are forced to stage in order to satisfy bureaucratic and algorithmic expectations of welfare and benefits systems. Applicants with invisible or communication…
- Emancipatory Research(also: Emancipatory Disability Research)
- A research paradigm that positions people with disabilities not merely as research subjects but as active agents who lead and control research about their own lives and experiences. Emerging from the disability rights movement and the social model of disability, emancipatory…
- Embodied Expertise(also: Embodied Knowledge, Tactile Expertise)
- Skilled knowledge that resides in the body through practiced physical routines, muscle memory, and sensory awareness rather than in explicit cognitive rules or visual information. In accessibility research, embodied expertise describes the sophisticated tactile and kinesthetic…
- Empathy Simulation(also: Disability Simulation, Impairment Simulation)
- A design technique where non-disabled people temporarily simulate a disability experience — such as wearing a blindfold, using a wheelchair, or restricting hand movement — to develop empathy and understanding for people with disabilities. While widely used in design education…
- Enforced Trust(also: Compelled Trust)
- A dynamic in which blind people are required to trust technologies, sighted individuals, and systems without having independent means to verify the information or outputs provided to them. Enforced trust arises from the knowledge imbalance where blind users cannot directly…
- Enhanced Activities of Daily Living(also: EADLs, EADL (gerontology), Advanced Activities of Daily Living)
- In gerontology and human-robot interaction research, the highest tier of everyday activities — higher-order social, recreational, and civic pursuits that enable full participation in society, such as using computers and the internet, volunteering, engaging in hobbies, pursuing…
- Episodic Disability
- A disability characterized by periods of illness or impairment interspersed with periods of wellness or relative health. Unlike fluctuating disability where severity varies continuously, episodic disability involves distinct episodes that may be unpredictable in timing,…
- Epistemic Contingency
- A concept from disability studies scholar Rod Michalko describing the start of acquiring a visual disability as an ongoing negotiation of ways of knowing. Blind epistemology — ways of knowing as a blind person — is fluid and relational, shaped by objects, environments, memories,…
- Epistemic Injustice(also: Knowledge Injustice)
- A form of injustice that occurs when someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower — either by having their testimony dismissed or undervalued (testimonial injustice) or by lacking the conceptual resources to understand their own experience (hermeneutical injustice). In…
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