Glossary

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DIY Assistive Technology(also: Do-It-Yourself Assistive Technology, Maker Assistive Technology)

DIY assistive technology refers to the practice of creating, modifying, or adapting assistive devices and tools through do-it-yourself methods, often using digital fabrication technologies such as 3D printers and laser cutters. This approach empowers people with disabilities,…

DIY assistive technology(also: DIY-AT, Maker assistive technology, Open-source AT)

Assistive devices and tools created or customised by end users, volunteers, or makers using accessible fabrication methods such as 3D printing, laser cutting, and off-the-shelf components. DIY-AT offers advantages over commercial assistive technology including lower cost,…

DIY-AT(also: Do-It-Yourself Assistive Technology, DIY Assistive Technology)

Assistive technology that is custom-made — often using digital fabrication, low-cost electronics, 3D printing, or everyday craft materials — by or with disabled people, their families, therapists, or community members, rather than purchased as a commercial product. DIY-AT…

DO-IT(also: Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking and Technology)

A pioneering program founded at the University of Washington in 1992 by Sheryl Burgstahler, funded by the National Science Foundation, to increase the participation of students with disabilities in science, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and careers. DO-IT…

DOM(also: Document Object Model)

A programming interface that represents an HTML or XML document as a tree structure of objects, where each node corresponds to a part of the document such as elements, attributes, and text content. The DOM is critical to accessibility because assistive technologies like screen…

DOM Manipulation(also: DOM Modification, Document Object Model Manipulation)

The programmatic modification of a webpage's Document Object Model (DOM) to change its structure, content, styling, or behavior. In accessibility contexts, DOM manipulation is used by browser extensions, accessibility overlays, and assistive tools to enhance web pages — for…

DOM Tree(also: Document Object Model, DOM)

A programming interface that represents an HTML or XML document as a hierarchical tree structure, where each node corresponds to a part of the document such as an element, attribute, or text content. Web browsers construct the DOM tree from HTML source code, and assistive…

DSM-5(also: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-IV, DSM)

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association, is the standard classification system used by clinicians and researchers to diagnose mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions. The current edition (DSM-5-TR,…

DTBook(also: Digital Talking Book XML, DAISY DTBook)

The XML text format used inside DAISY 3 (ANSI/NISO Z39.86) digital talking books to represent the text content of a book in a structured, accessible way. DTBook provides elements for headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, sidebars, poetry, and other document structures, enabling a…

DTMF(also: Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency, Touch-Tone)

DTMF (Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency) is the signaling system used when pressing keys on a telephone keypad, where each key press generates a unique combination of two audio frequencies. In accessibility contexts, DTMF input serves as an alternative interaction method for voice-based…

Daily Data Analysis(also: DDA, Everyday Data Analysis)

The common, everyday tasks of analyzing and deriving insights from data that people perform in their daily lives or work, such as splitting expenses among friends, computing stock portfolio changes, calculating averages, and comparing product prices. For blind and low-vision…

Daily Form(also: Daily Functioning Level)

The concept that a person's physical and cognitive capabilities can vary significantly from day to day due to chronic conditions, pain levels, fatigue, medication effects, sleep quality, and other factors. In accessibility and assistive technology design, daily form challenges…

Daily Living Skills(also: Activities of Daily Living, ADLs, Self-Care Skills)

The fundamental self-care tasks that individuals perform routinely, including personal hygiene (tooth-brushing, hand-washing, bathing), dressing, eating, toileting, and basic household tasks. For individuals with disabilities, particularly autism and intellectual disabilities,…

Dale-Chall Readability Formula(also: Dale-Chall, New Dale-Chall)

A readability formula first published by Edgar Dale and Jeanne Chall in 1948 and revised in 1995. Unlike formulas that rely only on surface counts, Dale-Chall compares every word in a text against a manually curated list of "easy" words familiar to fourth-grade readers; the raw…

Daltonization(also: Recolouring, Color Remapping)

Daltonization is a computational technique that modifies the colours in an image or on a screen to make them more distinguishable for people with colour vision deficiency (CVD). Named after John Dalton, who first described his own colour blindness in the 18th century,…

Damage-centered Design(also: Damage-centered Research, Deficit-framed Design)

An approach in HCI and design research that frames marginalized communities - including disabled people, BIPOC communities, and others - primarily through the lens of harms, deficits, and barriers to be remediated. The term, popularized by Eve Tuck and extended by Alexandra To…

Dark Mode(also: Dark Theme, Night Mode)

A display setting that uses light-colored text and interface elements on a dark background, reversing the typical light-mode color scheme. Dark mode can benefit users with light sensitivity, photophobia, or certain visual conditions by reducing screen glare and brightness.…

Dark Pattern(also: Deceptive Pattern, Manipulative Design)

A user interface design deliberately crafted to trick, manipulate, or coerce users into making unintended choices that benefit the service provider rather than the user. Dark patterns include hidden costs, forced continuity, disguised ads, confirm-shaming, and misdirection. In…

Dark Patterns(also: Deceptive Design Patterns, Deceptive Patterns, Manipulative Design)

User interface designs that trick or manipulate users into taking actions they did not intend, such as subscribing to services, sharing personal data, or accepting unfavorable terms. In the context of privacy, dark patterns in cookie notices might include pre-selected consent…

Dashboard Accessibility(also: Accessible Dashboards)

The practice of designing data dashboards — visual interfaces combining charts, key performance indicators, filtering widgets, and interactive data querying — so they are usable by people with disabilities, particularly screen reader users. Accessible dashboards require…

Dasher

A zooming text entry interface in which users write by navigating through a world of nested boxes, each labeled with a letter and sized proportionally to its probability under a language model. Users control navigation using any pointing device, including eye trackers, mice, or…

Data Accessibility(also: Accessible Data, Data Access)

The practice of making data and data-related tools usable by people with disabilities, ensuring that information presented in tables, charts, graphs, spreadsheets, and databases can be perceived, understood, and analyzed regardless of ability. Data accessibility encompasses both…

Data Annotation(also: Data labeling, AI labeling)

The process of attaching labels, transcriptions, bounding boxes, or other structured metadata to raw data so that it can be used to train, evaluate, or benchmark machine-learning models. Annotation is typically performed by human workers - in-house experts, clinicians,…

Data Colonialism

A critical framework, advanced by Couldry and Mejias (2019) and others, that describes how contemporary data extraction practices replicate historical patterns of colonialism — appropriating resources (here, data and attention) from communities, particularly in the Global South,…

Data Comics(also: Visual Data Comics, Narrative Visualization)

An emerging genre of data visualization that presents complex information in a sequential, comic-like format with discrete panels that progressively reveal data and narrative. Data comics break down composite visualizations into smaller, digestible pieces that build upon each…

Data Descriptor(also: Training Data Descriptor)

An automated metric or feedback mechanism that characterizes the quality or properties of a dataset, particularly training images used in machine learning. In accessibility research, data descriptors provide non-visual feedback to blind users about the quality of photos they…

Data Exploration(also: Exploratory Data Analysis, EDA)

The process of investigating and examining datasets to discover patterns, spot anomalies, test hypotheses, and check assumptions, typically as a preliminary step before formal analysis. For blind and low-vision users, data exploration is particularly challenging because sighted…

Data Feminism

A framework developed by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein that applies intersectional feminist thought to the practice of working with data, offering seven principles including examining power, challenging power, elevating emotion and embodiment, rethinking binaries,…

Data Glove(also: digital glove, sensor glove, wired glove)

A wearable input device equipped with sensors to capture hand and finger movements, positions, and orientations. Data gloves use technologies like gyroscopes, accelerometers, flex sensors, or fiber optics to track hand gestures. In accessibility, data gloves enable sign language…

Data Literacy(also: Data Fluency)

The ability to read, understand, create, and communicate data as information. Data literacy encompasses skills such as knowing how to interpret charts and graphs, identify trends and outliers, understand statistical concepts, and make evidence-based decisions from data. As data…

Data Minimization

A privacy principle requiring that organizations collect, process, and retain only the minimum amount of personal data necessary to accomplish a specific purpose. For assistive technology users, data minimization is particularly important because these technologies often capture…

Data Mining(also: Knowledge Discovery, KDD, Knowledge Discovery in Databases)

Data mining is the computational process of discovering patterns, rules, and relationships in large datasets, drawing on techniques from statistics, machine learning, and database systems. Common tasks include classification, clustering, association-rule mining, anomaly…

Data Physicalization(also: Physical Data Visualization)

The practice of representing data through physical, tangible objects rather than on-screen visualizations. Data physicalizations encode information in the shape, texture, size, weight, or other physical properties of objects, making data accessible through touch and spatial…

Data Protection(also: Data Privacy)

The practices, policies, and legal frameworks governing how personal information is collected, stored, processed, and shared by organizations. For assistive technology companies, data protection is especially critical because their products often collect intimate details about…

Data Protection Impact Assessment(also: DPIA, Privacy Impact Assessment, PIA)

A process required under GDPR Article 35 for assessing and mitigating risks to individuals' rights and freedoms before undertaking high-risk data processing. DPIAs are mandatory when processing is "likely to result in a high risk," including large-scale processing of special…

Data Representativeness(also: Dataset Representativeness, Demographic Representativeness)

The degree to which a dataset reflects the diversity of the population it is intended to serve, particularly across demographic dimensions such as age, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, and socioeconomic status. In AI and machine learning, unrepresentative training data leads…

Data Sharing(also: Open Data, Data Dissemination)

The practice of making research data available to other researchers or the public for reuse, replication, and further analysis. In accessibility research, data sharing presents unique tensions: datasets sourced from people with disabilities are essential for building inclusive…

Data Sonification(also: Auditory Data Display, Sonified Data Visualization)

The systematic mapping of data values to non-speech audio parameters such as pitch, volume, rhythm, timbre, or spatial location to make datasets perceivable through hearing. Data sonification is a key accessibility technique for making charts, graphs, and other data…

Data Sovereignty

The principle that data about a community — its people, territories, practices, or bodies — should be subject to the laws, governance, and collective authority of that community rather than of the outside entities that happen to collect or host it. The concept originated in…

Data Stewardship(also: Dataset Stewardship, Data Governance)

The responsible management of data throughout its lifecycle, including decisions about collection, storage, access, sharing, and disposal. In accessibility research, participatory data stewardship involves disabled data contributors in decisions about how their data is used,…

Data Structure

A way of organizing and storing data in a computer so that it can be accessed and modified efficiently. Common introductory data structures include arrays, linked lists, stacks, queues, trees (such as binary search trees), graphs, and hash tables, each with different access,…

Data Table(also: Genuine Table)

An HTML table element used to present structured, tabular information where data cells have a logical relationship to header cells. Accessible data tables require proper semantic markup including th elements for headers, scope attributes to define header direction (row or…

Data Transparency(also: Data Processing Transparency)

The practice of clearly communicating to users what data is collected, how it is processed, where processing occurs (on-device vs. cloud), how data is stored, and who has access to it. In accessibility contexts, blind users have expressed strong desires to understand data…

Data Visualization(also: Data Viz, Information Visualization)

The graphical representation of data and information using visual elements such as charts, graphs, maps, and diagrams. While data visualization is a powerful tool for communicating patterns and insights, it presents significant accessibility barriers for people with visual…

Data Visualization Accessibility(also: Accessible Data Visualization, Chart Accessibility, Visualization Accessibility)

The practice of designing charts, graphs, diagrams, and other visual data representations so they are perceivable, operable, and understandable by people with disabilities, particularly those who are blind or have low vision. This includes providing meaningful alternative text,…

Data sonification(also: Auditory graph, Audio chart)

The representation of data values through non-speech audio, typically by mapping numerical values to auditory parameters such as pitch, volume, duration, or timbre. Data sonification makes charts and graphs accessible to blind and low-vision users by allowing them to perceive…

Data visualization accessibility(also: Chart accessibility, Accessible data visualizations, Graph accessibility)

The practice of making charts, graphs, maps, dashboards, and other visual representations of data perceivable and understandable by people with disabilities, particularly screen-reader users and people with colour vision deficiencies. Most web-based visualizations are rendered…

Data-based Synthesis(also: Corpus-based Synthesis, Unit Selection Synthesis)

A speech synthesis technique that generates speech by selecting and concatenating segments from a large database of prerecorded human speech, rather than using rules to generate acoustic waveforms from scratch. The database is indexed with phoneme boundaries, pitch, and prosodic…

Data-to-Text(also: Data-to-Text Generation, Data-to-Text NLG)

A subfield of natural language generation (NLG) that automatically produces human-readable text from structured data, such as databases, spreadsheets, or sensor readings. Data-to-text systems analyze input data to identify patterns, trends, and salient features, then generate…

DataGlove(also: Data Glove, Sensor Glove, Cyber Glove)

A wearable input device fitted with sensors that captures hand shape, finger position, and hand orientation data in real time. Originally developed by VPL Research in the 1980s, DataGloves were used extensively in early virtual reality and sign language recognition research to…