Glossary

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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…

Active Noise Cancellation(also: ANC, Active Noise Control)

A technique that reduces unwanted ambient sound by using microphones to capture incoming noise and electronically generating an inverted (anti-phase) audio signal that destructively interferes with it, lowering the perceived noise reaching the listener's ear. ANC is the core…

Assistive Listening Device(also: ALD, Hearing Assistive Technology)

Any device designed to improve audibility for a person with hearing loss, beyond or in addition to a hearing aid or cochlear implant. Common examples include personal amplifiers, FM and radio-frequency systems, infrared systems, and induction loop (hearing loop) systems…

Audio-Video Synchrony(also: AV Sync, Lip Sync, Audio-Video Synchronization)

The temporal alignment between audio and video streams in multimedia content or real-time communication. When audio and video are not properly synchronized, the mismatch can significantly impair speech understanding for people with hearing loss who rely on lipreading to…

Aural Diversity(also: Hearing diversity)

A framework that recognizes the wide variation in how humans perceive and engage with sound, rather than treating typical hearing as the norm against which all other experiences are measured. Aural diversity spans d/Deaf, Hard of Hearing, hyperacusis, tinnitus, misophonia,…

Captioned Telephone(also: CapTel, Captioned Phone)

A telecommunications device that displays real-time captions of what the other party is saying during a phone call, enabling people who are hard of hearing to read the conversation while also listening. Captions are generated by a trained communications assistant who re-voices…

Hearable(also: Smart Earbud, Smart Earphone)

A class of in-ear or over-ear wearable devices that combine audio playback with one or more sensors and on-device computing - microphones for ambient audio capture, inertial sensors, biosensors, and machine-learning accelerators - enabling features beyond passive listening.…

Librosa

An open-source Python library for audio and music signal analysis, widely used in music-information retrieval and accessibility research to extract low-level acoustic features such as tempo, RMS energy, spectral centroid, zero-crossing rate, chroma, and mel-frequency cepstral…

Lipreading(also: Lip reading, Speechreading (narrow sense))

The practice of understanding spoken language by visually interpreting the movements of a speaker's lips, tongue, teeth, jaw, and facial expression. Lipreading is used by many Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing people — especially those who acquired hearing loss after learning spoken…

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…

Normal-Hearing Listener(also: NH Listener, Normal Hearing)

A research term for a participant whose audiometric thresholds fall within the clinical normal range (typically pure-tone thresholds of 25 dB HL or better across speech frequencies), used as a comparison group in hearing-accessibility studies. Normal-hearing (NH) listeners are…

Postlingual Deafness(also: Postlingually Deaf, Acquired Hearing Loss)

Hearing loss that occurs after a person has acquired spoken language, typically after about age three to five. Postlingually deaf people usually retain spoken-language fluency, literacy, and memory of sound, which affects their rehabilitation trajectory and their experience of…

Prelingual Deafness(also: Prelingually Deaf, Congenital Deafness)

Deafness present at birth or acquired before a child has developed spoken language, typically before around age three. Prelingually deaf individuals commonly learn a signed language as a first language and may have different literacy trajectories in the surrounding…

Remote Captioning(also: Remote CART, Remote Real-Time Captioning)

A live captioning service delivered at a distance, in which a human captioner (CART provider) or automatic speech recognition system receives an audio feed from a meeting, classroom, or event over the internet or a phone line and transmits transcribed text back to the user in…

Semantic Hearing(also: Programmable Hearing, Intent-Aware Hearing)

A research paradigm and class of systems that treat the user's auditory environment as something programmable: rather than uniformly amplifying or suppressing all sound, the wearable headphone or earbud uses on-device machine learning to selectively extract or attenuate specific…

Target Sound Extraction(also: Target Sound Separation, TSE)

A machine-learning task in which a model isolates a specific target sound (or class of sounds) from a complex acoustic mixture, conditioned on some specification of the target - a text label, a reference recording, or an embedding. Distinct from blind source separation (which…

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