A glossary of terms relevant to disability, accessibility and technology

Any obstacle that decreases a person’s opportunity for success (e.g., discriminatory practices, inaccessible buildings/public places/transportation, insufficient insurance/training/resources, negative attitudes).

Hearing loss where there may be enough residual hearing that a device like a hearing aid provides enough assistance for the person to process speech.

Physical equipment related to computers.

A temporary or permanent health impairment that affects one or more major life activities (e.g., aids, arthritis, cancer, diabetes, drug addiction, heart disease).

Partial or full hearing loss due to either a decibel loss (person hears all sounds much more softly than a person with complete hearing), or a frequency loss (person hears a pitch of a sound better than others, thus a person with frequency loss would hear all of some words, some parts of other words, and would not hear some words at all).

Complete or partial loss of ability to hear caused by a variety of injuries or diseases including congenital defects.

A general term that describes a broad range of hearing function, including deaf or hard of hearing. It’s the total or partial inability to hear sounds and can affect one or both ears.

An external program that can be called up by a web browser to display specially formatted material, such as word-processed documents, spreadsheet documents or video/sound pieces. The helper program is launched by the web browser as a separate application to view or play the file.

Any computer which holds internet resources for access by others, or the computer that maintains your internet access and email account.

A process that analyses HTML documents, identifies HTML errors and non-standard codes.