Glossary
Terms used in accessibility research and practice. Each entry has a definition, common aliases, and category tags.
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- Access as Friction
- A disability-studies framing, articulated by Jackson, Haagaard, and Williams, that reframes accessibility work as productive friction rather than seamless accommodation. Rather than smoothing every interaction, "access as friction" calls for designs that make users pause,…
- Adversarial Stakeholders
- Individuals, institutions, or systems that disabled people depend on for access but that simultaneously pose threats of harm. Examples include healthcare providers who discriminate based on stigmatized identities, government agencies that condition benefits on compliance, or…
- Affirmative Model of Disability(also: Affirmation Model)
- A disability framework that goes beyond the social model by acknowledging disabled individuals's lived experiences and emphasizing their abilities, strengths, and unique perspectives rather than limitations. The affirmative model celebrates disability as a positive identity,…
- Agency(also: User Agency, Sense of Agency)
- The capacity to act, make choices, and exert control over one's own life and environment. In disability studies, agency is distinguished from independence — a person can have agency (the ability to make decisions and direct actions) while still relying on others for support,…
- Agentive Amplifier
- A framing of technical artefacts, proposed by Oosterlaken and Van Den Hoven, as things that create possibilities a person would not otherwise have — extending, not replacing, the user's own agency. Under this view the ethical significance of a technology is judged by how it…
- Assistive Strategy(also: Access Strategy)
- Any approach, technique, or workaround that a disabled person develops to navigate inaccessibility and meet their needs. Unlike formal assistive technologies, assistive strategies may be informal, improvised, and deeply personal—ranging from choosing specific providers to…
- Autism Industrial Complex(also: AIC)
- A term coined by Alicia Broderick and Robin Roscigno to describe the commercial ecosystem that treats autism as a commodity, establishing it as a normative cultural narrative that necessitates intervention. The autism industrial complex encompasses the interconnected network of…
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