Accessibility Terms Glossary

Learning the Lingo

See a word you don't recognize or understand? We can help! Check out our glossary below.

Contact us for more information and guidance.

• 508

  • Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act was enacted to eliminate barriers in information technology, to make available new opportunities for people with disabilities and to encourage the development of technologies that will help achieve these goals. Under Section 508 (29 U.S.C. § 794d), Federal Agencies must give disabled employees and members of the public access to information that is comparable to the access available to others.

• a11y

  • Shorthand for “accessibility” as “a” followed by 11 more letters, followed by “y”

• Accelerator keys

  • Usually combinations of characters that allow users to make software commands instead of interacting with menu options or different levels of a user interface, also known as keyboard shortcuts.

• Access keys

  • An HTML attribute implemented to provide keyboard shortcuts to specific parts of a page or to follow certain links. This method is problematic due to the way it can create conflicts with user agents. It can, however, offer significant advantages to users of certain types of assistive technology when attempting to interact with different levels of a user interface.

• Accessibility

  • The inclusive practice of making usable by people with and without disabilities and give all users equal access to their content.

• Active Element

  • An element with behaviors that may be activated or triggered through user interface or scripts, some of the most common active elements include links and element instances with scripts.

     

• Alternative Information

  • Alternative information provides text equivalents for non-text content that may be inaccessible to persons with disabilities on websites such as video, audio and images.

     

• Americans with Disabilities Act

  • A federal law prohibiting the discrimination against people with disabilities, enacted by the United States government in 1990.

• AJAX

  • AJAX is an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It’s a method to utilize the abilities of JavaScript, the Document Object Model and XML to create interactivity one the web without requiring a page refresh.

• Alt Text (Alternative Text)

  • Alt text is used as backup text for images that do not load on a webpage. It also tells the user the nature or contents of the image and is used by screen readers to read out the descriptions of images to people with disabilities. The text must describe the content of the image like “Happy people in business meeting.”

    Alt text is typically short, around 125 characters or less.

     

• API (Application Programming Interface)

  • An API is a set of routines and tools for building software applications and defines how communication may take place between applications.

• ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications)

  • WAI-ARIA is a set of attributes that you can add to HTML elements. These attributes communicate role, state and property semantics to assistive technologies via the accessibility APIs implemented in recent browsers.

• ARIA-live

  • Aria-live is an attribute for ARIA that is used to set the priority with which screen reader should treat updates to live regions – the possible settings are: off/polite/assertive where off is the default. This would be set with HTML code.

• Assistive Technology

  • Technologies, both hardware and software, used to help increase, maintain or improve the capabilities of performing a task for a person with disabilities. Web assistive technology includes braille keyboards, audio browsers that read web pages or alternative entry devices, screen magnifiers, alternative pointing devices, etc.

• Attribute

  • A distinct characteristic of an object, used in SGML and XML. Elements types are often defined as having many attributes and can be integral in the accessibility of content.

• Audio browsers

  • Web browsers that provide a text-to-speech capability for the blind and visually impaired.

• Bookmarklet

  • A bookmarklet is a piece of JavaScript that is embedded in a browser bookmark and can be used as a shortcut to perform a wide variety of complex tasks.

• Braille terminal

  • Machines that convert text on a screen to braille by raising bumps through holes on a flat surface.

• Canonicalization

  • The process of establishing a single URL as the location of a web document. Despite being able to arrive at a particular page via multiple paths, there is only on final address resolved by the server.

• Captioning

  • The art of adding captions to a television program, move, recorded video, stream and more.

• Captions

  • A textual representation of sounds--usually associated with television programming or movies; captions are meant to display in real-time and to capture speech sounds and sounds beyond speech in some cases.

• Clickability cues

  • A visual indication that a given word or item on a web page is clickable. Cues that can be used to indicate the clickability of an item include color, underlining, bullets and arrows.

• CMS (Content Management System)

  • CMS is a software application used to oversee the operation of web information. Common CMS applications include software like WordPress, OU Campus and Drupal.

• Color Contrast

  • Contrast is the perceived difference between two adjacent colors. Two colors from different segments of the color wheel are contrasting colors. For example, red is from the warm half of the color wheel and blue is from the cool half. They are contrasting colors.

• Cookie

  • A cookie is a small text file sent to a web user’s computer by a website and can be used to identify that user to the website on their next visit to that page.

• CSS

  • Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language.

• Disability

  • Any impairment, physical or mental, that can make routine tasks more difficult or limits one or more major life activity.

• Discoverability

  • The ability of any feature to be found in the context in which it is needed.

• DOM (Document Object Model)

  • The Document Object Model is a representation of the structure of a web document that provides a means for scripts such as JavaScript to manipulate the content and layout of a page.

• Document Type Definition

  • A short statement at the beginning of an HTML or XHTML page that informs the user agent what set of rules should be applied on a page.

• Early adopters

  • A user who has a tendency to embrace new technology before the majority.

• Fieldset <fieldset>

  • The <fieldset> tag is used to group related elements in a form. It essentially draws a box around the related elements, making it easier to differentiate form sections.

• Form <form>

  • The <form> tag is used to create an HTML form for user input. Forms contain all of the elements you would typically see in login forms, registration forms and the contact us page form.

• Graceful Degradation

  • When a site utilizes new technology, if disabled, the content maintains effectiveness for the users.

• Heat maps

  • Color-based representations of areas of interest/focus points; generally associated with eye-tracking software.

• Hover State and Focus State

  • In CSS, a hover state is when the user moves their mouse over an element such as a button or menu item, whereas the focus state is when a user focuses on an element using tab and enter keyboard controls.

• <h1> Tag

  • In HTML, <h1> to <h6> tags are used to define HTML headings. <h1> defines the most important heading on each page. The only text more important than <h1> is the page title.

• HTML5 (HyperText Markup Language)

  • HTML is the standard markup language used to create web pages. HTML5 is the newest version of the language with more options available to create accessible websites.

• Input <input>

  • The <input> tag specifies a field where the user can enter data and are typically used within forms. An example would be the areas where you would type your email address and password to log into a website.

• Internationalization

  • A system whose primary design has been developed to work in multiple languages and in the cultural contexts of different locales.

• JavaScript

  • One of the most used scripting languages; JavaScript is a client-side programming language that can be used with almost all user agents.

• JAWS (Job Access With Speech)

  • JAWS is one of the most commonly used screen readers available.

• Label <label>

  • The <label> tag provides a means of defining with the <input> element. A <label> tag will link with <input> tag, allowing the user to identify the meaning of the <input>. An example would be the text “Email Address” and “Password” beside the inputs in a login form.

• Late adopters

  • Individuals who are hesitant to adopt new technology.

• Link

  • A link, also known as a hyperlink, is text or images you can touch or click and will take you to another web page, file or section of the site.

• Localization

  • Customizing or personalizing a national or international product for a local market.

• Long Descriptions

  • Descriptions that are written for complex figures and tagged via the long desc attribute; though not currently supported by most web browsers, the long desc attribute is a planned feature in the next iteration of Firefox.

• Luminance Contrast Ratio

  • A measure of the difference between foreground and background; specific minimal values are recommended via WCAG 2.0.

• MySQL

  • MySQL is an open-source database software base on the SQL vocabulary that can be employed in combination with almost any server-side language.

• Mark-up

  • A mark-up is what the browser sees. If something is marked up as a link, it can receive focus and take you somewhere else.

• Modal Dialogue Box

  • “Modal” for short. Modals are portions of text that pop up inside of the web page window, prompting you to take an action or serving you a reminder. Modals should be used sparingly because they disrupt the flow of what a user is doing.

• Null alt text

  • Null alt text is including alt text within an “img,” but without any content. An example would be <img alt=” “>. This should only be done for decorative images, spacers and pixels.

• Open Source

  • Open Source software is licensing model of software that gives free access to the source code of the software to allow interested parties to modify or contribute to the software as they see fit. Commonly created as collaborative projects and shared at no cost.

• Perl

  • One of the earliest server-side scripting languages. Perl is not commonly used when creating new products but remains one of the most widely supported and utilized languages.

• PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor)

  • PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language that can be used to create a variety of different sized applications.

• Programmatic Focus

  • Where the computer's focus is on a web page.

• Rich Media

  • Internet technology involving interactivity animation or other special effects. A common source of accessibility issues due to the lack of alternative text on a webpage.

• Radio Button

  • In a form, the radio button allows the user to choose only one of a set of predefined options. Whereas a checkbox allows users to choose multiple options.

• Screen reader

  • A software program used to allow reading of content and navigation of the screen using speech or Braille output. Used primarily by people who have difficulty seeing. JAWS and NVDA are examples.

• Search Engine Friendly

  • A search engine friendly website has taken steps to guarantee there are no obstacles blocking access for web crawlers to web page content.

• Search Engine Optimization

  • The process of making certain a website appears as high as possible on the list of results returned by a search engine, in order to maximize the volume and quality of website traffic.

• Section 508 (see also 508)

  • Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act was enacted to eliminate barriers in information technology, to make available new opportunities for people with disabilities, and to encourage the development of technologies that will help achieve these goals. Under Section 508 (29 U.S.C. § 794d), federal agencies must give disabled employees and members of the public access to information that is comparable to the access available to others.

• Semantic Markup

  • Semantic markup is the idea of creating more meaning with the information in web pages and web applications. This makes it easier for devices to understand what each aspect of the code means for the end-user. HTML5 markup has to be optimized to allow developers to create more semantic markup.

• Server Side

  • Scripting that is performed on the server before a page is sent to the user agent.

• Screen Reader

  • A type of assistive technology that uses synthetic language to read and navigate digital documents to the blind. JAWS and NVDA are two of the most commonly used.

• Style

  • Style is what you see visually on a page using CSS.

• Tab Index

  • Tab index is an HTML attribute that defines the order in which links should be followed when using the “tab” key to navigate a page. Without tab index specifies, links will be followed in the order for particular assistive technologies to successfully navigate a webpage.

• Text-Aware

  • A device that is text-aware is able to communicate information expressed in text to the user of the device. A web browser extracts text and displays it visually on a screen. A screen reader extracts and displays it as speech. Text-aware devices are a significant mode of universal communication since input format can be communicated in a variety of different output forms.

• Transcript

  • A text-only version of what's said in a movie, television program, recorded video, livestream lecture and more; they are not real-time and they generally are limited to speech only; they are not a recommended substitute for captions.

• Usability

  • The principle that information and applications should not only be accessible but also easy to use and understand.

• User Agent

  • The generic term used to describe any device that might access a webpage.

• Web Accessibility

  • The principle that all web users should have equal access to information available on the internet.

• WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)

  • The WCAG are a set of guidelines intended to help web content authors prepare their content for use by people with disabilities and ensure equal access to websites.

• Visual Focus

  • Where the user's focus is on a web page; generally represented by a dashed box that appears around items on the page and associated with tabbing.

• WCAG 2.0

  • The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 is focused on providing an international technical standard for web content. It has 12 guidelines that are organized under four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. The guidelines each have testable success criteria, which are at three levels: A, AA and AAA.

• Widget

  • A widget is a small application installed and used on websites. Each widget has a varying amount of purposes. An example of a widget is a small, email newsletter signup form or third-party live chat functionality.

• XML (Extensible Markup Language)

  • XML is a generic format intended for maximum flexibility to provide information in a wide variety of structural formats.

• XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language)

  • A language that describes the formatting and presentation of XML content.

(Glossary of terms pulled from Usability.gov and Accessible360.com)