Glossary
Terms used in accessibility research and practice. Each entry has a definition, common aliases, and category tags.
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- Closed-loop Interaction(also: Closed-Loop Feedback, Perform-Assess-Adjust Cycle)
- An interaction pattern in which a system continuously observes the user's action, evaluates it, and returns immediate feedback that shapes the next attempt, producing an iterative perform-assess-adjust cycle. Closed-loop interaction contrasts with open-loop designs that present…
- Cognitive Artifact(also: Cognitive Artefact)
- An artificial device — physical or digital — designed or appropriated to maintain, display, or operate on information in ways that support human cognitive performance. The term was codified by Don Norman to describe how objects like calendars, shopping lists, sticky notes,…
- Collaboration Awareness(also: Workspace awareness, Collaborator awareness)
- The ongoing, up-to-the-moment understanding of what collaborators are doing, where they are working, and what has recently changed in a shared workspace. In sighted collaboration, awareness is typically conveyed through visual cues — cursors, avatars, highlights, and selection…
- Confederate(also: Research Confederate, Study Confederate)
- A person who plays a scripted role in a research study while appearing to participants as a naive participant, bystander, or user. Confederates allow researchers to observe how true participants behave in realistic social situations — for example, how a blind user interacts with…
- Counteractive Frictions(also: Counteractive Friction)
- A concept introduced by Ly et al. for the deliberate, strategically produced disruptions that marginalised communities generate to contest hegemonic infrastructures — petitions, protests, Human Rights Tribunal filings, targeted social-media campaigns, guerrilla postering.…
- Counterventions(also: Countervention)
- A concept introduced by Rua Williams, Louanne Boyd, and Juan Gilbert for reflexive interventions in HCI and design that unsettle ableist norms by shifting focus from individual deficit to exclusionary sociotechnical systems. Counterventions call for disabled people to be…
- Crip HCI
- An orientation within human-computer interaction that brings crip theory and crip technoscience into the methods, design practices, and evaluation frameworks of computing research. Rather than asking how technology can accommodate disabled users within existing normative…
- Critical Computing
- An umbrella term for HCI and computer-science scholarship that interrogates the values, power relations, and social consequences of computing technologies rather than taking their benefits as given. Critical computing draws on disability studies, science and technology studies…
- Critical Technical Practice(also: CTP)
- A research stance, articulated by Philip Agre in 1997, in which technologists reflect critically on the assumptions built into their own systems while continuing to build. Critical technical practice argues that technologies embody theory—every design choice encodes a…
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