Glossary
Terms used in accessibility research and practice. Each entry has a definition, common aliases, and category tags.
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- Capability Sensitive Design
- A design approach, proposed by Ilse Oosterlaken, that takes human diversity morally seriously and evaluates technologies by how they actually expand or constrain the real opportunities (capabilities) available to individual users. Capability Sensitive Design extends the…
- Charity Model of Disability(also: Charity Model)
- A framework that views people with disabilities as helpless victims who are dependent on the goodwill and benevolence of others. Under this model, disability is treated as a tragedy requiring charitable intervention, positioning disabled people as passive recipients of aid…
- Child Agency
- Child agency is a child's capacity to initiate, shape, direct, and sustain activities - including play, conversation, and social interaction - rather than passively accepting adult or peer control. In accessibility research for children, agency is recognised as relational and…
- Crip Spacetime
- A concept developed by disability-studies scholar Margaret Price to describe the material-discursive reality in which disabled people live according to temporalities and spatialities that remain invisible to privileged groups. Crip spacetime names the significant extra effort…
- Crip World-Making
- Crip world-making, articulated by Robert McRuer and related disability theorists, describes the generative practices through which disabled people make hostile environments liveable - hacking, repurposing and reconfiguring tools, spaces and social norms to fit their bodyminds…
- Critical Disability Studies(also: CDS)
- An interdisciplinary academic field that examines disability as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon rather than solely a medical condition. Critical disability studies analyzes how disability is constructed through language, institutions, power relations, and cultural…
- Critical Disability Theory(also: Critical Disability Studies, CDT)
- An interdisciplinary theoretical framework that examines disability as a social, political, and cultural phenomenon rather than solely a medical condition. Critical disability theory draws on disability studies, critical theory, and intersectional analysis to challenge dominant…
- Critical Gerontology
- An interdisciplinary approach to the study of aging that critiques the dominant biomedical framing of later life and foregrounds structural, political, and cultural influences on older people's experiences. Critical gerontology rejects the "discourse of decline" in which aging…
- Cure Narrative(also: Cure Rhetoric, Fix-It Mentality)
- A dominant cultural narrative that frames disability as a problem to be eliminated, cured, or overcome through medical intervention, technology, or personal determination. Cure narratives position the non-disabled state as the default ideal and disability as a departure that…
- Cyborg(also: Cybernetic Organism)
- A being that integrates both organic and technological components, extending human capabilities through mechanical or digital augmentation. In disability studies and accessibility research, the cyborg concept has been applied to understand how people with disabilities who use…
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