Glossary

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Attention Capture Pattern(also: Attention Capture, Attention Grabbing Design)

A design element on a website intentionally crafted to draw users' attention toward content that serves the site's interests rather than the user's goals. Examples include bright promotional banners, flash sale notifications, pop-up offers, and visually prominent recommendation…

Audience Modelling(also: Audience Modeling, User Modelling)

The practice of characterizing and formally describing distinct groups of users and their interaction characteristics to inform the design and evaluation of web interfaces. In accessibility, audience modelling involves identifying the specific abilities, disabilities, devices,…

Audio CAPTCHA(also: Audio HIP, Audio Human Interaction Proof)

An auditory alternative to visual CAPTCHAs, typically presenting distorted spoken letters, numbers, or words that users must transcribe. While intended as an accessible alternative for blind users, research shows audio CAPTCHAs have success rates of only 43-50% for screen reader…

Audio Enriched Links(also: AEL, Audio Link Preview)

A JAWS screen reader extension that provides spoken previews of linked web pages before a blind user follows a hyperlink. When activated on a focused link, the system fetches the destination page in the background and speaks a summary including the page title, its relationship…

Audio HTML Access(also: AHA, AHA Framework)

Audio HTML Access (AHA) is a framework of principles for choosing sounds to use in audio-based HTML interfaces, developed by Frankie James at Stanford University in the late 1990s. The framework provides structured guidelines for selecting audio cues to represent web document…

Aural Browsing(also: Aural Navigation, Aural Web Browsing)

Aural browsing refers to the experience of navigating and consuming web content through auditory output, primarily via screen readers that read page content aloud sequentially. Unlike visual browsing where users can scan and skim pages at a glance, aural browsing is inherently…

Aural CSS(also: Aural Cascading Style Sheets, CSS Aural Properties, CSS Speech)

Aural CSS refers to CSS properties designed to control the auditory presentation of web content, originally specified as the "aural" media type in CSS2 and later revised as the "speech" media type in CSS3. These properties allow web authors to specify how content should be…

Aural Glancing

The auditory equivalent of visually glancing at a web page — the ability for screen reader users to quickly get a sense of what sections and content are available on a page without being forced to listen to every element serially. Aural glancing aims to bridge the fundamental…

Authoring Tool(also: Web Authoring Tool, Content Authoring Tool)

An authoring tool is any software application used to create or modify web content, ranging from code editors and content management systems (CMS) to visual page builders and social media platforms. The W3C's Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) address two aspects of…

Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG)(also: ATAG, ATAG 2.0)

A W3C Web Accessibility Initiative standard that provides guidelines for designing authoring tools — such as content management systems, website builders, and code editors — that are both accessible to authors with disabilities and capable of producing accessible web content.…

Automated Accessibility Testing(also: Automated A11y Testing, Accessibility Scanning)

The use of software tools to programmatically check web content against accessibility guidelines such as WCAG. Tools like Axe, WAVE, Google Lighthouse, and AChecker translate accessibility rules into automated checks applied to HTML elements. While efficient for detecting…

Automated Accessibility Testing(also: Automated Testing, Accessibility Scanning, A11y Testing)

The use of software tools to programmatically check web content against accessibility guidelines such as WCAG, identifying issues like missing alternative text, insufficient color contrast, empty links, and missing form labels. While automated tools such as WAVE, axe, and…

Automated Web GUI Testing(also: AWGT, Automated GUI Testing, Web Crawler Testing)

Automated Web GUI Testing (AWGT) refers to software testing approaches that automatically explore web applications by performing GUI interactions such as clicking and form input, without requiring manually written test scripts. AWGTs build a state model of the application during…

Automated accessibility testing(also: Automated a11y testing, Accessibility checker)

The use of software tools to automatically evaluate digital content against accessibility standards, checking for issues like missing alt text, colour contrast violations, missing form labels, untagged PDF structure, and incorrect heading hierarchy. Automated testing can…

Automatic Alt Text(also: AI-generated Alt Text, Auto Alt Text, Machine-generated Alt Text)

Alternative text for images that is automatically generated by artificial intelligence systems using computer vision and natural language processing. Platforms like Microsoft PowerPoint, Facebook, and Twitter have incorporated automatic alt text features to increase image…

Axe(also: axe-core, Deque Axe)

An open-source accessibility testing engine developed by Deque Systems that checks web content against WCAG and other accessibility standards. Axe can be integrated into browsers (via browser extensions), development workflows (via axe-core library), and testing frameworks (via…