Glossary

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Access Intimacy

A concept coined by disability justice activist Mia Mingus describing the elusive, deeply felt connection that occurs when someone else genuinely understands and responds to your access needs. Access intimacy goes beyond formal accommodations to encompass the relational and…

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…

CARE Principles(also: CARE, Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics)

A set of people-and-purpose-oriented principles for Indigenous data governance developed by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance — Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics — designed to complement the more technical FAIR principles (Findable,…

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…

Counteractive Frictions(also: Counteractive Friction)

A concept introduced by Ly et al. for the deliberate, strategically produced disruptions that marginalised communities generate to contest hegemonic infrastructures — petitions, protests, Human Rights Tribunal filings, targeted social-media campaigns, guerrilla postering.…

Counterventions(also: Countervention)

A concept introduced by Rua Williams, Louanne Boyd, and Juan Gilbert for reflexive interventions in HCI and design that unsettle ableist norms by shifting focus from individual deficit to exclusionary sociotechnical systems. Counterventions call for disabled people to be…

Crip HCI

An orientation within human-computer interaction that brings crip theory and crip technoscience into the methods, design practices, and evaluation frameworks of computing research. Rather than asking how technology can accommodate disabled users within existing normative…

Crip World-Making

Crip world-making, articulated by Robert McRuer and related disability theorists, describes the generative practices through which disabled people make hostile environments liveable - hacking, repurposing and reconfiguring tools, spaces and social norms to fit their bodyminds…

Cross-Disability

A research, advocacy, or design orientation that deliberately engages multiple disability communities at once rather than treating disability as a single-axis category or focusing on a single impairment group. Cross-disability work surfaces shared structural barriers (ableism,…

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…

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 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…

Disability-Led Design(also: Disability-Led)

A design practice in which people with disabilities are not consultants, test subjects, or "users" but the authors, directors, and decision-makers shaping the work. Disability-led projects invert the typical power dynamic of accessibility research: non-disabled researchers and…

Ethic of Care(also: Care Ethics, Feminist Ethics of Care)

A moral and methodological framework, rooted in feminist philosophy, that centers relationships, responsibility, and responsiveness to the needs of others rather than abstract principles or transactional exchange. In accessibility and participatory research, an ethic of care…

Extractive Research(also: Extractive UX Research)

A critique of research practices — common in industry UX and academic HCI — in which researchers take data, insights, or stories from a community, often marginalized, without ongoing relationship, reciprocity, or benefit flowing back. Extractive research is associated with…

Flourishing(also: Developmental Flourishing, Human Flourishing)

An orientation in design and HCI that measures success not by task completion or outcome equivalence but by the extent to which a system supports individuals' subjective well-being, personal significance, agency, and ongoing development. The concept draws on positive psychology,…

Hierarchy of Impairment(also: Hierarchy of Impairments, Disability Hierarchy)

The hierarchy of impairment refers to the phenomenon where certain types of disabilities and impairments are viewed more favorably or given greater attention than others, both by non-disabled people and within the disability community itself. Research by Mark Deal documented how…

Leadership of the Most Affected

A core principle of disability-justice organising that positions people most directly affected by a problem — those with the most at stake and the most lived expertise — as the leaders of work aimed at solving it, rather than as consultants, testers, or recipients of others'…

Multiply Marginalized(also: Multiply Marginalised, Multiply Marginalized Disabled People)

A term used in disability justice and intersectional scholarship to describe people whose lived experience sits at the intersection of multiple marginalised identities — for example, disabled people who are also Black, queer, poor, immigrant, or women. Centring multiply…

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…

OCAP Principles(also: OCAP, Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession)

A set of principles developed by the First Nations Information Governance Centre establishing that First Nations communities must own, control, access, and possess data and information about themselves — their people, territories, resources, and cultural knowledge. OCAP emerged…

Pseudo-participation(also: Pseudo-participation by Design)

A term coined by Palacin et al. (2020) to describe forms of user involvement in design that appear participatory on the surface but grant participants limited power to shape outcomes. In accessibility and AI contexts, pseudo-participation occurs when disabled people are invited…

Relational Sovereignty

A framework proposed by Jang, Carrington and Begel (2026) as a new goal (telos) for socially assistive technology, defined as the recognised authority of a disabled person to choose their relational mode — acting independently or interdependently — and to set the terms on which…

Routine Infrastructuring

A concept developed by Bryan Semaan describing community practices through which marginalised and oppressed groups continually reconfigure sociotechnical arrangements to sustain everyday life under persistent disruption. Unlike classical infrastructuring, which treats disruption…

Simultaneous Assistance

Simultaneous assistance, described by Cynthia Bennett and Daniela Rosner, is a form of support in which help flows in multiple directions at once rather than unidirectionally from a non-disabled helper to a disabled recipient. In a simultaneous-assistance encounter, the disabled…

Supported Decision-Making(also: SDM)

A legal and practical alternative to guardianship in which a person with a cognitive or developmental disability retains decision-making authority over their own life while receiving support from trusted people — family, friends, advocates — who help them understand options,…

Testimonial Injustice

A form of epistemic injustice, articulated by Miranda Fricker, in which a speaker's credibility is unjustly deflated because of prejudice attached to their identity. In accessibility and aging research, testimonial injustice occurs when researchers treat older adults' or…

Whole-Self(also: Whole Self)

A concept from disability justice that frames a disabled person's identity, needs, and preferences as a rich, multidimensional whole — cultural background, lived experiences, interests, relationships, and aspirations — rather than being reduced to their disability or impairment.…

Wholeness

Wholeness is a core principle of the 10 Principles of Disability Justice articulated by Sins Invalid: the recognition that 'each person is full of history and life experience' and has inherent worth outside capitalist notions of productivity. It challenges medical-model framings…

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