Glossary
Terms used in accessibility research and practice. Each entry has a definition, common aliases, and category tags.
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- Tactile Accuracy
- Tactile accuracy is an evaluation criterion for measuring how well a person perceives the shape information of an object in a tactile image through touch. Unlike "naming accuracy" (whether someone can name the object), tactile accuracy captures whether the person has obtained…
- Tactile Acuity(also: Touch Acuity, Tactile Resolution)
- The ability to perceive and discriminate fine spatial details through the sense of touch, analogous to visual acuity for sight. Tactile acuity varies across body regions, with fingertips having the highest resolution at approximately 1-2mm spacing. In the context of…
- Tactile Exploration Strategy(also: Haptic Exploration Strategy, Touch Exploration Pattern)
- A systematic approach or pattern that a person uses when exploring tactile graphics, maps, or other touch-based representations. Research has identified several distinct strategies: "following outlines" (tracing the borders of shapes), "saccade" (jumping between specific zones),…
- Tactile Perception(also: Cutaneous Perception, Touch Perception)
- Tactile perception is the process of perceiving and interpreting information through the sense of touch, encompassing both cutaneous perception (sensing through the skin in a stationary process, detecting texture, pressure, vibration, temperature, and pain) and haptic perception…
- Tactile Texture(also: Haptic Texture)
- The surface quality of a material or graphic element as perceived through touch, characterized by properties such as roughness, smoothness, density, height, pattern regularity, and directionality. In tactile graphics, different textures are used to represent different regions or…
- Telepresence
- The extent to which a user feels present in a remote or virtual environment rather than their actual physical location. In VR contexts, telepresence describes the sensation of being transported to the virtual world. For disabled users, VR telepresence offers unique opportunities…
- Texture Differentiation(also: Tactile Discrimination)
- The ability to perceive and distinguish between different textures through touch. In the context of tactile graphics, texture differentiation is the fundamental perceptual capacity that allows readers to identify different regions and understand the information encoded in a…
- Texture Perception(also: Texture sense, Tactile texture perception)
- The perceptual capacity to detect and characterize surface properties — roughness, smoothness, bumpiness, graininess, stickiness, and directional patterns — through touch, vision, or cross-modal integration. Texture perception draws on multiple tactile channels including…
- Two-Point Discrimination(also: Spatial Acuity, Tactile Acuity)
- A measure of tactile sensitivity indicating the minimum distance at which two distinct points of contact on the skin can be perceived as separate rather than as a single point. Lower values indicate higher sensitivity. The fingertips have the highest two-point discrimination…
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