Glossary

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Role Switching(also: Role Rotation, Role Alternation)

An educational strategy where learners alternate between different roles or responsibilities within a collaborative activity. In collaborative sign language learning, role switching allows players to alternate between controlling manual signs and non-manual signs, ensuring both…

Role-Based Access Control(also: RBAC)

An authorisation model in which system permissions are attached to roles (e.g., user, administrator, clinician, caregiver) and users are granted one or more roles rather than permissions directly. Widely used in healthcare, enterprise software, and increasingly in…

Role-play(also: Role-playing, Roleplay)

A social behaviour in which a person treats a non-human or virtual agent as if it had a character, feelings, or agency — narrating its actions, giving it a name, addressing it in character, and rationalising its mistakes with in-character explanations. In accessibility research…

Roll-up Captions(also: Roll-up style, Scroll-up Captions)

A captioning display style in which text is added one word or line at a time, scrolling upward as new text arrives and pushing earlier lines off the top. Roll-up is typically used in live captioning because it can display words as they are produced without waiting for a full…

Rollator(also: Wheeled Walker, Rolling Walker)

A walking frame equipped with wheels, handbrakes, and typically a built-in seat, designed to provide stability and support for people with mobility difficulties. Unlike standard walkers that must be lifted with each step, rollators roll forward continuously, reducing the…

Route Description(also: Verbal Route Description, Navigation Instructions)

A verbal or written account of how to travel from one location to another, including directions, landmarks, warnings, and environmental features. Research with blind and partially sighted travelers has shown that effective route descriptions include information about turns and…

Route Knowledge(also: Procedural Knowledge, Sequential Knowledge)

Route knowledge is a type of spatial understanding that consists of sequential, turn-by-turn information about how to get from one place to another along a specific path. In navigation for people with disabilities, route knowledge is what most GPS apps provide — step-by-step…

Route Learning(also: Route Familiarization)

The process by which a traveler — particularly a blind or low-vision person — acquires a mental representation of a specific path through an environment, including its turns, landmarks, distances, surface changes, and points of interest. Route learning is a core component of…

Route Planning(also: Journey Planning, Pre-Journey Planning)

The process of determining a path from an origin to a destination before travel begins, including selecting roads or paths, identifying landmarks and decision points, and considering factors such as safety, accessibility, and personal preferences. For blind and visually impaired…

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…

Routinisation(also: Routinization, Age-Related Routinisation)

The tendency of older adults to increasingly organise their daily activities into fixed, predictable routines as they age. As cognitive resources decline, older adults optimise their remaining capacity by performing activities in the same order, at the same times, and in the…

Row-Column Scanning(also: RCS, Grid Scanning, Two-Switch Scanning)

The most widely used single-switch selection method for augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices and on-screen keyboards. Options are arranged in a two-dimensional grid, and the interface sequentially highlights each row. When the user clicks their switch, the…

Rubber Banding(also: Rubber-Band AI, Catch-Up Mechanic)

A handicapping technique, common in racing games, that dynamically adjusts the speed or performance of leading and trailing players to keep them close together. Traditional rubber banding operates by boosting the trailing player or hampering the leader in ways that are not…

Ruby Annotation(also: Ruby Text, Furigana, Ruby Markup)

Small glossing text placed above, beside, or below a base character to indicate pronunciation or meaning — most commonly used for Japanese furigana (kana reading hints above kanji), but also applied in Chinese bopomofo/pinyin, Korean hangul aids, and multilingual teaching…

Rumination(also: Mental Compulsion, Obsessive Rumination)

A repetitive, often circular pattern of thinking in which a person dwells on distressing thoughts, questions, or scenarios without reaching resolution. In OCD, rumination is a covert mental compulsion where individuals repeatedly analyze obsessive thoughts, seek mental…

Running Stitch(also: Back Stitch, Stem Stitch)

A basic embroidery stitch that creates a dashed or continuous line by passing the needle in and out of the fabric at regular intervals. Running stitch and its variants (back stitch, stem stitch) are fundamental line-making stitches used in embroidery. In tactile graphics,…

Runtime Accessibility(also: dynamic accessibility, on-demand accessibility adaptation)

Runtime accessibility refers to the ability to modify, adapt, or enhance the accessibility of a software application or digital environment while it is actively running, rather than through static design-time configurations or developer-authored presets. Traditional…