Glossary

Terms used in accessibility research and practice. Each entry has a definition, common aliases, and category tags.

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Multisensory Stimulation(also: MSS): A therapeutic and design approach that intentionally coordinates multiple sensory modalities — visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and kinetic — to support affective well-being, cognitive engagement, and behavioral regulation. MSS has a long clinical history in dementia care…
Multitouch Surface(also: Multi-Touch Interface, Multitouch Interface, MTS): A multitouch surface is an input device that uses optical or capacitive sensors to detect and track multiple simultaneous finger contacts on a flat surface. Unlike conventional touchpads that rely on a single finger for functionality, multitouch surfaces can recognize complex…
Multivariate Data(also: Multivariate Dataset, High-Dimensional Data): Data in which each observation or sample has more than two measured variables (dimensions). Analysing multivariate data is a core task in statistics, science, and business intelligence, but presenting it accessibly is difficult: traditional charts effectively show two or three…
Muscle Atrophy(also: Muscular Atrophy): A condition involving the wasting or loss of muscle tissue, resulting in decreased muscle strength and endurance. Muscle atrophy can occur due to disuse, neurological conditions, or disease, and often affects an individual's ability to perform daily tasks independently. In the…
Muscle Contraction(also: Voluntary Muscle Activation): The deliberate tensing of a muscle group that generates an electrical signal (electromyographic or EMG signal) detectable by surface electrodes. In assistive technology, intentional muscle contractions serve as input signals for controlling devices when traditional input methods…
Muscle Fatigue(also: Motor fatigue): A decline in the capacity of a muscle or muscle group to generate force or sustain activity after prolonged or repeated exertion. In human-computer interaction, muscle fatigue is a central concern for input modalities requiring sustained or repetitive motion — notably mid-air…
Muscle-Computer Interface(also: MCI (Muscle-Computer Interface), EMG Interface): An input modality in which signals generated by muscle contractions — typically recorded via surface electromyography (sEMG) sensors worn on the forearm or other muscle group — are interpreted by a computer to recognise discrete gestures or continuous control signals. Coined by…
Muscular Dystrophy(also: MD): A group of inherited genetic conditions that cause progressive weakness and loss of muscle mass, affecting mobility, upper limb function, and in some forms, respiratory and cardiac function. People with muscular dystrophy often rely on electric wheelchairs for mobility and may…
Muscular Dystrophy(also: MD): A group of inherited genetic conditions that cause progressive weakness and degeneration of skeletal muscles, the muscles that control movement. There are many types of muscular dystrophy varying in severity, age of onset, and which muscles are affected. Because muscular…
Muscular Dystrophy(also: MD): A group of genetic diseases characterized by progressive weakness and degeneration of the skeletal muscles. There are more than 30 types, including Duchenne, Becker, limb-girdle, and myotonic muscular dystrophy, each with different patterns of muscle involvement and progression.…
Museum Accessibility(also: Accessible Museums): The practice of designing museum experiences, exhibitions, programs, and physical spaces to be inclusive and usable by visitors with disabilities. Museum accessibility encompasses physical access (ramps, elevators, wheelchair-accessible pathways), sensory access (tactile…
Music Accessibility(also: Accessible Music, Musical Accessibility): The practice of making musical experiences — including listening, performing, composing, and learning — available to people with disabilities. Music accessibility encompasses a wide range of approaches, from sensory substitution technologies that convert sound to vibration or…
Music Braille(also: Braille Music, Braille Music Notation): A tactile music notation system that uses combinations of braille dots to represent musical elements including pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo markings, and other performance instructions. Music braille allows blind and low-vision musicians to read musical scores through touch.…
Music GenAI(also: Generative Music AI, AI Music Generation): Generative AI systems that produce musical output — melodies, full songs, instrumental accompaniment, or vocal tracks — from text prompts, seed audio, or structured parameters. Examples include Suno, Udio, MusicLM, and MusicGen. In accessibility and therapy contexts, music GenAI…
Music Haptics(also: Musical Haptics, Haptic Music): The use of touch-based feedback — including vibrations, textures, and force — to convey musical information such as pitch, tempo, timbre, articulation, dynamics, and rhythm. Music haptics draws on the fact that haptic receptors in the skin, muscles, and joints naturally relay…
Music Information Retrieval(also: MIR): An interdisciplinary field focused on extracting, analyzing, and organizing information from music data. Music information retrieval encompasses tasks like automatic transcription, genre classification, melody extraction, beat tracking, and music recommendation. For…
Music Notation(also: Musical Notation, Sheet Music): A system of written symbols used to represent musical sounds, including pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and other performance instructions. Standard visual music notation uses staff lines, notes, and other graphical symbols that are inherently visual. For blind and visually impaired…
Music Notation Accessibility: The practice of making written music scores perceivable and usable by musicians with visual impairments and other disabilities. This encompasses the creation of alternative formats like Braille Music, Modified Stave Notation, and large print music, as well as the development of…
Music Pedagogy(also: Music Education, Music Teaching): The theory and practice of teaching and learning music, including methods for instruction, curriculum design, and assessment. In accessibility contexts, music pedagogy for blind and low vision learners faces significant challenges: most music teachers have little knowledge of…
Music Psychotherapy: A form of music therapy that uses musical activities — songwriting, improvisation, lyric analysis, receptive listening — to address emotional, psychological, and relational concerns rather than sensory or rehabilitative goals. Practitioners are typically licensed music…
Music Stand Accessibility: The design and arrangement of music stands to accommodate the needs of musicians with disabilities, particularly those with low vision who must position enlarged scores or digital devices close to their face while playing. Standard music stands may be too small for A3 or…
Music Therapy: A clinical and evidence-based practice that uses music interventions to accomplish individualized therapeutic goals, including improving communication, social interaction, emotional expression, and motor skills. For people with disabilities, music therapy can be particularly…
Music Visualisation(also: Music Visualization, Sound Visualisation, Audio Visualisation): The representation of musical or audio content through visual media such as drawings, animations, colour changes, or motion graphics. Music visualisation is an important accessibility strategy for deaf and hearing-impaired people, enabling them to perceive and engage with…
Music Visualization(also: Music visualisers, Visual music): The representation of musical content — pitch, rhythm, timbre, dynamics, melody, lyrics, or emotion — through visual rather than auditory channels. Visualizations range from abstract mappings of audio features (spectrograms, particle systems, pulsing geometry, lyric typography)…
Music-Induced Analgesia(also: music analgesia, music-based pain relief): The phenomenon by which listening to music reduces the subjective experience of pain. Research consistently shows that self-selected, personally meaningful music produces stronger analgesic effects than researcher-prescribed music, suggesting that emotional engagement,…
MusicXML: An open, XML-based standard format for representing Western musical notation, enabling the exchange of sheet music between different music notation software applications. MusicXML encodes the structural and visual elements of a musical score in a machine-readable format, making…
Musical Accessibility(also: Music Accessibility): The design and practice of making music creation, performance, learning, and appreciation available to people with disabilities. Musical accessibility spans multiple research communities including Human-Computer Interaction and New Interfaces for Musical Expression, addressing…
Musical Emotion(also: Music-Induced Emotion, Emotional Response to Music): The emotional content perceived in, or felt in response to, a piece of music, typically analysed along dimensions such as valence and arousal or via categorical labels (cheerful, tense, calm, sad, energetic, love, dreamy). Musical emotion arises from low-level acoustic…
Musicking: A term coined by musicologist Christopher Small to describe music as an activity or process rather than a thing. Musicking encompasses all participation in a musical performance—playing, listening, dancing, composing, practicing, and providing the setting—and emphasizes that…
MutationObserver(also: DOM Mutation Observer, Mutation Records API): An HTML5 browser API that monitors and reports changes to the Document Object Model (DOM) structure of a web page in real time, including additions and removals of elements, attribute changes, and text modifications. For accessibility, MutationObserver is significant because it…
Mutual Aid: Mutual aid is a practice of collective care in which community members voluntarily share resources, support, and assistance based on principles of solidarity and reciprocity rather than charity. In disability communities, mutual aid networks play a critical role in filling gaps…
Mutual Support(also: Mutual support in HRI, Mutual assistance): In accessibility and human-robot interaction research, a framing that moves beyond one-way robot-supports-user or user-supervises-robot models toward a bidirectional relationship in which each party compensates for the other's limitations. For a blind user travelling with an…
Myo Armband(also: Thalmic Myo): A commercially available wearable gesture-recognition armband released by Thalmic Labs in 2014 and discontinued in 2018, containing eight dry sEMG electrodes sampling at 200 Hz plus a 9-axis IMU. Despite its discontinuation, the Myo remains widely used in accessibility and HCI…
Myoelectric Control: The use of electromyographic (EMG) signals from voluntary muscle contractions as control inputs for external devices, most commonly powered upper-limb prostheses but also exoskeletons, wheelchairs, and general computer input. Traditional myoelectric control uses direct mappings…
Myopathy(also: Muscle Disease): A group of disorders affecting skeletal muscle function, characterized by muscle weakness, cramping, stiffness, or wasting. Myopathies can be inherited (muscular dystrophies) or acquired (inflammatory myopathies, metabolic myopathies). For digital accessibility, people with…
Myopia(also: Nearsightedness, Short-Sightedness): A common refractive error in which the eye focuses light in front of the retina rather than on it, causing distant objects to appear blurred while near objects remain clear. Myopia occurs when the eyeball is too long or the cornea is too curved, and affects an estimated 30% of…

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