Glossary

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ABA Reversal Method(also: ABA Design, Reversal Design)

The ABA reversal method is a single-subject experimental design in which one participant is observed across three phases: a baseline (A), an intervention (B), and a return to baseline (A). By comparing performance across the A-B-A sequence, the design isolates the effect of the…

ABC Model(also: Antecedent-Behavior-Consequence, ABC Analysis, ABC Framework)

A behavioural-science framework, rooted in B. F. Skinner's operant conditioning, that analyses any observed behaviour as a three-part sequence: Antecedent (the situation, trigger, or context immediately before the behaviour), Behaviour (what the person actually did), and…

Abandonment of Assistive Technology(also: Assistive Technology Abandonment, AT Abandonment, Assistive Technology Discontinuance)

Abandonment of assistive technology is the well-documented phenomenon in which a substantial proportion of assistive devices acquired by disabled users — commonly reported in the literature at roughly one-third or higher — end up unused or discarded within a few years of…

Active Perception(also: Active Sensing, Sensorimotor Exploration)

A view of perception in which the perceiver is not a passive receiver of stimuli but an active agent who moves, orients, and manipulates the environment to gather the sensory information needed for a task. In accessibility and sensory substitution research, active perception is…

Ambiguous Loss

Ambiguous loss, a concept articulated by Pauline Boss, is 'a situation of unclear loss that remains unverified and thus without resolution'. Boss distinguishes two types: physical loss where someone is 'gone, but not for sure' (for example, a missing person) and psychological…

Ask-Point(also: Help Request Point)

Ask-point is a term introduced in disability-and-HCI research to name a discrete moment in daily life at which a person with a disability must request help from a caregiver, family member, or other person — for example, reaching for a dropped object, opening a door, transferring…

Bricolage

Bricolage is the practice of creating something from whatever materials happen to be at hand — duct tape, pool noodles, velcro strips, PVC pipes, household fabric scraps, bent sponges — rather than purpose-designed parts or specialized tools. The term, from Lévi-Strauss via…

COM-B Model(also: COM-B, Capability Opportunity Motivation Behaviour Model)

A behaviour-change framework proposed by Michie, van Stralen, and West (2011) that identifies three necessary conditions for behaviour to occur: Capability (physical and psychological ability, including skills and knowledge), Opportunity (physical and social environment that…

Continuing Bonds

Continuing bonds is a theory of grief, developed by Klass, Silverman and Nickman in the 1990s, which holds that healthy mourning often involves maintaining an ongoing relationship with a deceased or absent loved one rather than achieving closure and 'letting go'.…

Emotional Mediation Hypothesis

A theoretical account, originating in work by Palmer and colleagues, that explains cross-modal associations between sensory attributes (such as colors and musical timbres) as being mediated by shared emotional meaning rather than by direct perceptual mapping. For example, people…

Error Profile(also: Accessibility Error Profile, Violation Profile)

An error profile is a structured summary of the accessibility issues detected on a page, typically represented as a numeric vector with one component per checkpoint or rule — counts of violations, binary pass/fail indicators, or failure rates. Error profiles were introduced in…

Fragile Learning Continuity

A framework proposed by Bhuiyan et al. (2026) to describe how accessibility in low-resource Deaf education depends not on any single feature — visibility, sign clarity, vocabulary, or connectivity — but on sustained alignment across visual, linguistic, technological, and…

Gaze Reinstatement(also: Gaze Reinstatement Effect, Looking-at-Nothing Paradigm)

Gaze reinstatement is the cognitive phenomenon in which a person mentally recalling or imagining a previously seen scene reproduces, on a blank or unrelated surface, eye movement patterns similar to those made when the scene was first viewed. The effect was demonstrated through…

Ground Truth(also: Gold standard, Reference labels)

In machine learning, the labels treated as authoritative when training or evaluating a model - typically produced by human annotators or expert consensus and assumed to represent the 'correct' answer. Critical AI scholarship has shown that ground truth is socially constructed:…

Guiard's Theory of Asymmetric Bimanual Action(also: Guiard kinematic chain model, Asymmetric bimanual action model)

Yves Guiard's 1987 model describing how the two hands typically take complementary, asymmetric roles in everyday manual tasks. The non-dominant hand sets a coarse spatial frame of reference that the dominant hand operates within, the non-dominant hand precedes the dominant hand…

Guided Participation

Guided participation is a concept from Barbara Rogoff's developmental psychology describing how children learn through engaged collaboration with more experienced partners in everyday shared activities - not through formal instruction, but through side-by-side participation…

Hermeneutical Injustice

Hermeneutical injustice, a concept developed by philosopher Miranda Fricker, is a form of epistemic injustice in which a person's experience is unintelligible to themselves or others because the collective interpretive resources of their community lack the concepts, vocabulary…

Information Perceptualization(also: Perceptualization)

Information perceptualization is the mapping of abstract data or information onto perceptual properties across multiple sensory modalities — vision, hearing, touch, and occasionally taste or smell — in a coordinated, multimodal display. It generalises the more familiar notion of…

Information Rate(also: Throughput, Bandwidth)

The amount of information successfully communicated per unit of time through a communication channel or interface, measured in bits per second. In HCI and assistive technology evaluation, information rate quantifies how efficiently a user can convey commands or intentions…

Information Theory(also: Shannon Theory, Mathematical Theory of Communication)

A mathematical framework developed by Claude Shannon in 1948 for quantifying the transmission, processing, and storage of information. Central concepts include entropy (the measure of uncertainty or unpredictability in a message source), information rate (the reduction of…

Lifestyle Modelling(also: Lifestyle Monitoring, Lifestyle Modeling)

Lifestyle modelling is the correlation of a person's observed day-to-day activities — sleeping, eating, moving between rooms, interacting with objects — with inferences about their well-being, usually using data from ambient sensors in the home. In accessibility and…

Listening Rate(also: Comprehension Speed, Listening Speed)

The maximum speed at which an individual can accurately comprehend spoken or synthesized speech, typically measured as a normalized value or in words per minute. Research shows that experienced screen reader users can achieve listening rates far exceeding typical human speech…

Mental Imagery(also: Visual Imagery, Mind's Eye Imagery)

Mental imagery is the experience of perceiving sensory information, most often visual, in the absence of the corresponding external stimulus, such as picturing a familiar face or replaying a remembered scene. Imagery vividness varies widely between individuals and is commonly…

Moneywork

A term coined by sociologist Sandra Colavecchia and introduced to HCI by Perry and Ferreira, describing the often-invisible labour of managing personal and household finances. Moneywork includes practical tasks (paying bills, budgeting, shopping, filing tax returns) and the…

Neural Plasticity(also: Neuroplasticity, Brain Plasticity)

The brain's ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. In the context of accessibility, neural plasticity explains how people who are blind or visually impaired develop enhanced auditory and tactile processing abilities—the brain regions that…

Neuroqueer Technoscience

A theoretical framework, developed by Nick Walker and extended in HCI by Barros Pena, Williams and others, that builds on crip technoscience and the neuroqueer paradigm to position neurodivergent people as active agents who remake worlds, technologies, and social relations.…

Parasocial Relationship(also: Parasocial Tie, Parasocial Interaction)

A parasocial relationship is a one-sided emotional bond that a media audience forms with a performer, creator, or online personality — the viewer feels a sense of friendship, loyalty, and familiarity despite no reciprocal awareness. In accessibility contexts, parasocial ties are…

Peer Culture

Peer culture is the body of shared understandings, values, social norms, communication practices, and play conventions that children co-construct among themselves through daily interaction - distinct from the adult culture that surrounds them. It defines who can join play, how…

Perceived Accessibility(also: Subjective Accessibility, Accessibility-in-Use)

Perceived accessibility refers to the subjective quality by which users experience the accessibility of a website or application, as opposed to its objective compliance with accessibility standards. Research has shown that guideline-conformant websites can still be perceived as…

Perpetual Contact

Perpetual contact is a sociological term coined by James Katz and Mark Aakhus to describe the state, enabled by mobile phones and later by ubiquitous internet messaging, in which people maintain constant availability to their social network regardless of physical location. For…

Phenomenology(also: Phenomenological Inquiry)

Phenomenology is a philosophical tradition and research methodology concerned with the structures of lived, first-person experience. Originating with Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, it emphasizes how phenomena appear to consciousness rather than what they are in objective…

Prosociality(also: Prosocial Behavior, Prosocial Behaviour)

Prosociality refers to voluntary behaviour intended to benefit others, including helping, sharing, comforting, and cooperating. In accessibility and dementia research, prosocial acts observed during group activities - passing a card so a peer can see it, a reassuring touch on…

Randomization Test(also: Randomisation Test, Permutation Test)

A randomization test (also called a permutation test) is a non-parametric statistical test that computes a p-value by re-shuffling the observed data many times under the null hypothesis and asking how often the re-shuffled data produce a test statistic as extreme as the one…

Sensemaking(also: Sense-making)

The cognitive and social process of giving structure to ambiguous, incomplete, or unfamiliar information so that one can act on it. In HCI and information science, sensemaking is studied as iterative cycles of foraging for information, building mental representations, testing…

Shannon Entropy(also: Information Entropy, Source Entropy)

A measure of the average uncertainty or unpredictability associated with a set of possible outcomes, defined by Claude Shannon as H = -Σ p(x) log₂ p(x), where p(x) is the probability of each outcome. In the context of interface evaluation, entropy quantifies how much uncertainty…

Situated Learning

A theory of learning, associated with Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, which holds that knowledge is not primarily abstract information transferred between minds but an embodied practice acquired through doing things in a real social context with other practitioners. In…

Small-n Experimental Design(also: Small-sample Design, Single-case Design)

Small-n (or single-case) experimental design is a family of research methodologies aimed at drawing rigorous causal conclusions from very few — sometimes just one — participants. The approaches include ABA reversal, multiple baseline designs, alternating treatments, and changing…

Somaesthetics

Somaesthetics is a philosophical discipline, developed by Richard Shusterman, that treats the living, sentient, purposive body (the soma) as both a locus of aesthetic appreciation and a medium of creative self-fashioning. It integrates analytical, pragmatic, and practical…

Stage-Based Model(also: Stage-Based Model of Personal Informatics)

A model of personal-informatics use, introduced by Ian Li, Anind Dey, and Jodi Forlizzi (2010), describing how people move through five stages of self-tracking: preparation (deciding to track), collection, integration, reflection, and action. The model made early contributions…

Translated Deaf Self

A concept coined by Alys Young, Jemina Napier, and Rosemary Oram describing how deaf signers' lifelong experiences of being encountered, represented, and inter-subjectively known by others occur in a translated form. The term captures the ontological consequences of routine…

Weber's Law(also: Weber Ratio, Weber's Ratio, Weber-Fechner Law)

Weber's Law is a foundational principle of psychophysics stating that the smallest detectable change in a stimulus — the just-noticeable difference — is a roughly constant fraction of the stimulus magnitude rather than a fixed absolute amount. For example, if a user can reliably…

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