Glossary

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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…

Deficit-Oriented Research(also: Deficit Model, Deficit-Based Approach)

A research approach that frames its subjects primarily in terms of what they lack, cannot do, or need to have fixed, rather than recognizing their strengths, agency, and lived expertise. In disability and accessibility research, deficit-oriented approaches treat disabled bodies…

Demand Characteristics

Cues within a research study that signal to participants what the researcher expects or hopes to find, leading participants to adjust their behavior or responses to meet those perceived expectations. In accessibility research, demand characteristics can be especially pronounced…

Deployment Study(also: Field Deployment, In-the-Wild Study)

A research method where technology is placed in users' real-world environments for an extended period to observe natural usage patterns, adoption behaviors, and long-term experiences. Unlike controlled lab studies, deployment studies capture ecological validity by revealing how…

Design-Based Research(also: DBR)

A collaborative, iterative research methodology used in education and human-computer interaction that develops theory and refines interventions through cycles of design, implementation, evaluation, and redesign in authentic real-world settings. DBR involves practitioners and…

Disability Simulation(also: Simulation Study, Simulated Disability)

A research or awareness technique where non-disabled individuals attempt to experience disability through artificial constraints such as blindfolds, noise-dampening headphones, vision-distorting glasses, or wheelchair use. While sometimes used for preliminary technology…

Disability-Centered Evaluation(also: Disability-Centric Evaluation, Disability-First Evaluation)

An approach to evaluating AI systems, tools, or research artefacts that places disabled people's lived experiences, information needs, and failure contexts at the centre of study design — including which data are collected, how ground truth is annotated, which models are tested,…

Disability-First Dataset(also: Disability-first AI dataset)

An approach to AI dataset creation, articulated by Theodorou et al. and others, that treats serving a disability community as the primary objective rather than collecting disability data as a minority slice of a general-purpose dataset. Examples include VizWiz (blind…

Disability-Led Research(also: Disabled-Led Research, Disability-Centered Research)

Research that is conceived, designed, conducted, and interpreted by disabled people rather than about them by non-disabled researchers. Disability-led research recognizes that disabled people hold unique expertise about their own experiences, needs, and solutions that cannot be…

Disability-first Design(also: Disability-first Approach, Disability-centered Design)

A design and research methodology that positions disabled people as active contributors and decision-makers rather than passive subjects or end-users in technology development. In contrast to approaches where non-disabled researchers create solutions for disabled users,…

Discriminative Ability(also: Discriminative ability of a metric, Discriminability)

In accessibility research methodology, the property of an evaluation metric to reveal statistically significant differences between stimuli that are known to differ along the dimension being measured. For example, a comprehension-question metric has discriminative ability for…

Disruptiveness index(also: D index, Disruption index, CD index)

A bibliometric measure that quantifies the degree to which a scientific paper disrupts or consolidates existing knowledge. Calculated from citation patterns, it ranges from -1 (fully consolidating, where subsequent papers always cite both the focal paper and its references) to 1…

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