Glossary

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AI Ghostwriter Effect(also: Ghostwriter Effect)

A phenomenon, first named by Draxler and colleagues, in which people who use AI writing assistants do not perceive themselves as authors or owners of the resulting text yet still publicly self-declare authorship. The effect persists even when personalization makes outputs…

AI for Accessibility(also: AI4A, Artificial Intelligence for Accessibility)

An umbrella framing used by technology companies and researchers for applications of artificial intelligence — including computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, and generative models — intended to benefit disabled users. Common examples include…

Abstract Widget(also: Abstract Interaction Object)

A user interface component defined by its semantic purpose and interaction behavior rather than its visual appearance. Abstract widgets specify what a user can do (select from options, enter text, trigger a command) without prescribing how the interaction is rendered — it could…

Accessibility Tax(also: Crip Tax, Disability Tax, Access Tax)

The cumulative direct and indirect costs — financial, temporal, cognitive, and emotional — that disabled people pay to obtain the same access, outcomes, or opportunities available to non-disabled peers. Coined in non-academic contexts as 'crip tax' and distinguished by Olsen et…

Accessibility-supported(also: Accessibility supported technology)

A WCAG 2.0 concept describing a web technology that has sufficient support from user agents (browsers) and assistive technologies to reliably convey accessibility information to users with disabilities. For a technology to be considered accessibility-supported, it must contain…

Acoustic Accessibility(also: Sound Accessibility)

An emerging framing of accessibility that considers a user's full acoustic environment - which sounds reach them, how loud, and in what mix - as a design surface to be adapted to individual sensory needs rather than treated as fixed background. While hearing accessibility has…

Adapted Curriculum(also: Adapted Computer Curriculum, Modified Curriculum, Curriculum Adaptation)

An adapted curriculum is an educational programme that has been modified to accommodate the learning needs, styles, and abilities of students with disabilities while maintaining the core learning objectives of the standard curriculum. Adaptations may include one-on-one tutoring…

Adaptive Disclosure(also: On-Demand Disclosure, Progressive Disclosure for Accessibility)

An interface design pattern in which supplementary accessibility content — summaries, keyphrase previews, navigation maps, alternative descriptions — is revealed only when the user requests it rather than shown alongside the primary content at all times. Adaptive disclosure…

Aesthetic Experience(also: Aesthetic Need, Aesthetic Accessibility)

The emotional, sensory, and imaginative enjoyment people derive from environments, art, media, and everyday scenes - distinct from functional or task-oriented information. Aesthetic accessibility argues that blind, low-vision, Deaf, and cognitively disabled users should have…

Age-Related Accessibility(also: Aging and Accessibility, Older Adult Accessibility)

The design considerations and accommodations needed to ensure digital technology is usable by older adults who experience age-related changes in vision, hearing, cognition, and motor control. Common challenges include reduced visual acuity and contrast sensitivity, narrowed…

Alternative Input Method(also: Alternative Input, Non-Standard Input)

Any method of providing input to a computer or device that differs from the conventional keyboard, mouse, and touchscreen interfaces. Alternative input methods are essential for people with motor, sensory, or cognitive disabilities who cannot use standard input devices…

Appropriation

In HCI and accessibility research, the process by which users adapt, repurpose, or extend a technology beyond its designers' original intent to fit their own practices and contexts. Appropriation is often how disabled users bridge the gap between generic products and their…

BVI(also: Blind and Visually Impaired, BLV, Blind and Low Vision)

A widely used abbreviation in accessibility and HCI research denoting "blind and visually impaired" — the inclusive category that covers people who are totally blind, legally blind, or have any form of low vision. Closely related variants include BLV ("blind and low vision"),…

Binary Search Tree(also: BST)

A node-based binary tree data structure in which each node has at most two children and satisfies the BST property: every value in the left subtree is less than the node's value, and every value in the right subtree is greater. This ordering enables efficient search, insertion,…

Blind(also: Blindness)

A visual impairment severe enough that a person cannot use vision as their primary means of perceiving information, typically defined legally in the United States as best-corrected visual acuity of 20/200 or worse in the better eye, or a visual field of 20 degrees or less.…

Brute-Force Fallback(also: Reset Strategy, Exhaustive Recovery)

A workaround strategy employed by assistive technology users when standard interaction methods fail, involving systematically trying all available options or completely restarting a task from a known good state. Brute-force fallbacks are particularly common among screen reader…

Care Web(also: Care Web in Practice)

A care web is a relational network of overlapping, often reciprocal support that sustains a disabled person's participation in everyday life, described by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in 'Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice'. Rather than locating support in a single paid…

Checklist Accessibility(also: Checklist Conformism, Checklist Compliance)

A critique of accessibility practice in which organisations treat accessibility as a set of discrete technical checks to be ticked off (alt text present, ARIA labels declared, contrast ratios met) rather than as ongoing engagement with disabled users. Checklist accessibility can…

Child Agency

Child agency is a child's capacity to initiate, shape, direct, and sustain activities - including play, conversation, and social interaction - rather than passively accepting adult or peer control. In accessibility research for children, agency is recognised as relational and…

Co-Authorship(also: Co-authoring, AI Co-Authorship)

In AI-mediated writing and communication, the shared production of text between a human user and an AI system, where neither party fully owns the resulting output. Co-authorship raises questions about credit, intent, authenticity, and accountability, and these become especially…

Conversational Management(also: Conversation Management, Interactional Management)

The processes by which interlocutors jointly regulate the structure of a conversation - taking and ceding turns, pre-empting interruptions, shifting attention and topic, repairing misunderstandings, and maintaining flow over time. In AAC research, conversational management is a…

Customization(also: User Customization)

Customization is the practice of allowing users to adapt a system's behaviour, output, or presentation to match their individual goals, preferences, and context. In accessibility, customization is essential because disability is heterogeneous: users of screen readers, AI…

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,…

Deafness

A hearing loss profound enough that a person cannot rely on hearing as the primary channel for language and environmental awareness, typically defined audiologically as a loss of 90 decibels or more in the better ear. Deafness exists on a spectrum and has strong cultural…

Decision Confidence

A reframing of accessibility as whether a user can judge product suitability, transaction risk, and information trustworthiness well enough to act independently — introduced by Ryskeldiev et al. (2026) in the context of blind and low-vision e-commerce. Where WCAG conformance…

Delegated Agency(also: Delegated Technical Agency)

Delegated agency occurs in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) when a close conversation partner (such as a parent or aide) acts on behalf of an augmented communicator to advance the communicator's conversational goals. This may include expanding on the…

Design Exclusion(also: Exclusion Audit, Technology Exclusion)

The process by which certain users are prevented from effectively using a product or service due to mismatches between the design of the technology and their abilities, circumstances, or available resources. Design exclusion can result from physical, sensory, or cognitive…

Desire Paths(also: Desire lines)

A term from urban design describing the unofficial trails that pedestrians wear into grass or dirt when built sidewalks do not meet their needs - the visible trace of an infrastructure users have improvised for themselves. In accessibility design, the metaphor is used (e.g., by…

Dialogue Design(also: Interaction Dialogue, User Dialogue Design)

Dialogue design in human-computer interaction refers to the structured planning of the conversational exchange between a user and a system, defining how input is accepted, how the system responds, and how errors are handled across interaction turns. In accessible interface…

Digital Citizenship

Digital citizenship refers to the capacity to participate fully, safely and recognisably in online and digital public life - having roles, routines and voice in the platforms where shared culture and civic life are increasingly located. For disabled users, and particularly…

Direct Speech Access(also: Speech-Enabling)

An approach to providing speech output where applications generate spoken feedback directly from their semantic context, as opposed to the traditional screen-reading approach where an external program interprets the visual display. In direct speech access, each application has…

Dual User Interface(also: Dual Interface, Concurrent Accessible Interface)

An interface design approach in which two distinct, purpose-built user interfaces are provided simultaneously for different user groups — typically one visual interface for sighted users and one non-visual interface for blind or visually impaired users. Unlike screen reader…

Embodied Knowledge(also: Embodied expertise, Lived knowledge)

Knowledge that is grounded in bodily experience rather than externally observable behaviour or abstract rule - the kind of knowing a person who stutters has about the tension before a block, a blind person has about which photo crops preserve meaning, or a Deaf signer has about…

End-User Programming(also: EUP, End-User Development, EUD)

A design approach that enables people without formal programming training to create, modify, or combine software behaviors to suit their own needs. Typical end-user programming systems expose computational building blocks through accessible interfaces such as visual block…

Environmental Sound(also: Ambient Sound, Non-Speech Audio)

Any auditory information in a person's surroundings that is not speech, including sounds from appliances, alarms, animals, doorbells, traffic, weather, and other environmental sources. For deaf and hard of hearing people, awareness of environmental sounds is a significant…

Execution Gap(also: Gulf of Execution)

From Don Norman's model of human-computer interaction, the distance between a user's goals and the physical actions required to achieve them using a given system. A system with a wide execution gap forces users to translate what they want into technical commands, parameters, or…

Experiential Accessibility(also: Experience-Centric Accessibility)

An approach to accessibility that goes beyond removing barriers to ensure disabled people can have equitable, meaningful experiences with technology—not just functional access. In the context of experiential technologies like virtual reality or games, this means designing for…

Failure Mode(also: Accessibility failure mode)

In accessibility evaluation, any hindrance caused by a product or web site that prevents a user with a disability from achieving a goal with the same effectiveness, efficiency or safety as a non-disabled user. The term is borrowed from reliability engineering and is used to…

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…

Graceful degradation(also: Graceful degradation)

A design strategy in which web content built with newer or advanced technologies continues to function and remain accessible when those technologies are not supported by a user's browser or assistive technology. Under WCAG 2.0, technologies that are not accessibility-supported…

Human-Centered Computing(also: Human-Centred Computing, People-Centered Computing)

Human-centered computing is an approach to technology design and development that places human needs, capabilities, and experiences at the center of the design process. It emphasizes understanding the full diversity of human physical, sensory, and cognitive abilities, and…

Inclusive Learning(also: Inclusive Education Design, Accessible Learning)

An educational approach that ensures all learners, including those with disabilities, can fully participate in and benefit from learning activities and materials. Inclusive learning involves designing curricula, content, and delivery methods that accommodate diverse abilities,…

Intermedia(also: Intermedia Representation)

Intermedia refers to a framework for information representation that supports diverse, adaptable, and flexible presentation modes, allowing the same content to be accessed through multiple alternative forms suited to individual needs and capabilities. Unlike multimedia (which…

Latency(also: Delay, Lag, Response Time)

The time delay between when an event occurs and when its accessible representation is delivered to the user. In real-time captioning, latency is the gap between spoken words and their appearance as text, typically measured in seconds. In screen readers and other assistive…

Mathematical Notation Accessibility(also: Math Accessibility, Accessible Mathematics)

The practice of making mathematical expressions, equations, and formulae perceivable and understandable by people with disabilities, particularly those who are blind or have low vision. Mathematical notation is inherently two-dimensional and spatial — using superscripts,…

Memory(also: Human Memory)

The cognitive capacity to encode, store, and retrieve information and past experiences. Memory is typically distinguished into short-term/working memory, long-term memory (which includes episodic, semantic, and procedural subtypes), and autobiographical memory of one's own life.…

Menu-Driven Interface(also: Menu-Based Interface, Menu Selection Interface)

A user interface style in which the available actions at each point in the interaction are presented to the user as an on-screen list, and the user selects an option by number, letter, keystroke, or pointer. Menu-driven interfaces reduce the need to memorise commands and are…

Mimetic Language(also: Sound Symbolism, Phonomimes, Ideophones)

Words or vocalizations whose sounds imitate or evoke the sensory qualities of what they describe, such as the rustle of leaves, the thud of a drum, or the hiss of escaping air. Mimetic language sits alongside and overlaps with onomatopoeia but extends to non-auditory qualities…

Misfit

A concept from disability-studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson describing 'an incongruent relationship between two things' - the material mismatch between a body and an environment not built for it. Rather than locating disability in the individual, the misfit frames…

Mixed-Initiative Interaction(also: Mixed-Initiative Systems, Human-Agent Collaboration)

An interaction paradigm in which both the human user and the computer system can take initiative in directing the task, rather than one party being entirely in control. In accessibility contexts, mixed-initiative interaction is particularly important for AI-powered assistive…