Clear, plain-language definitions for every accessibility term you need to know — from ADA law to WCAG standards, assistive technology, and beyond.
An accessibility overlay is a third-party JavaScript widget that claims to automatically detect and fix website accessibility issues, but independent research, court rulings, and disability advocacy organizations have consistently found that overlays do not deliver meaningful accessibility and may increase legal risk.
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A WCAG 2.2 success criterion that requires login and authentication processes to be usable without relying on cognitive function tests such as memorizing passwords or solving puzzles.
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Web forms designed and coded so that all users, including those using assistive technologies, can perceive, understand, navigate, and complete them.
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The accessible name is the text string that assistive technologies use to identify and announce a user interface element, computed from visible labels, ARIA attributes, or other sources through a defined algorithm.
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Website navigation systems designed so that all users, including those with disabilities, can find, understand, and use them to move through content effectively.
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A PDF document that is structured and tagged so that its content can be read and navigated by assistive technologies such as screen readers.
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Data tables on the web that are properly structured with headers, captions, and semantic markup so assistive technologies can convey the relationships between cells.
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The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a landmark U.S. civil rights law enacted in 1990 that prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, including employment, education, transportation, and access to public and private places open to the general public.
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ADA compliance means meeting the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act to ensure that people with disabilities have equal access to facilities, services, employment, and digital content — including websites and mobile applications.
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A systematic evaluation of a website, application, or physical space to determine whether it meets ADA requirements and WCAG standards for accessibility.
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A designated individual within a public entity responsible for coordinating compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, including handling grievances and ensuring accessibility across the organization.
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An ADA demand letter is a formal written notice from an individual or attorney alleging that a business has violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, typically demanding that accessibility barriers be removed and offering to settle before filing a lawsuit.
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An ADA lawsuit is a civil rights legal action filed under the Americans with Disabilities Act alleging that a business or organization has discriminated against people with disabilities by failing to provide accessible facilities, services, or digital experiences.
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A modification or adjustment to a job, workplace, or process that enables a qualified person with a disability to participate equally, as required by the Americans with Disabilities Act.
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Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits employment discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities, requiring employers with 15 or more employees to provide reasonable accommodations.
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ADA Title III prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in places of public accommodation operated by private entities, including hotels, restaurants, retail stores, healthcare providers, and — as courts and the DOJ have increasingly affirmed — their websites and digital services.
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Title IV of the Americans with Disabilities Act requires telephone and internet companies to provide telecommunications relay services for individuals who are deaf, hard of hearing, or have speech disabilities.
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Title V of the Americans with Disabilities Act contains miscellaneous provisions including anti-retaliation protections, attorney's fees, the relationship to other laws, and insurance-related rules.
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The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act is a Canadian provincial law that sets mandatory accessibility standards for organizations in Ontario, with the goal of achieving full accessibility by 2025.
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ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) is a set of HTML attributes defined by the W3C that add semantic meaning to web elements, enabling assistive technologies like screen readers to understand and interact with dynamic content and custom interface components.
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aria-describedby is an ARIA attribute that links an element to one or more other elements that provide additional descriptive text, giving assistive technology users supplementary context beyond the element's accessible name.
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aria-expanded is an ARIA attribute that indicates whether a collapsible element controlled by a button or link is currently expanded or collapsed, communicating this state to assistive technology users.
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aria-hidden is an ARIA attribute that removes an element and its children from the accessibility tree, making them invisible to assistive technologies while keeping them visually rendered on the page.
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aria-label is an ARIA attribute that provides an accessible text name for an element, used when visible text is not available or sufficient to describe the element's purpose to assistive technology users.
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aria-live is an ARIA attribute that designates a region of the page as a live region, causing assistive technologies to automatically announce content changes within that region without requiring the user to navigate to it.
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Assistive technology is any device, software, or equipment that helps people with disabilities perform tasks they would otherwise be unable to do, including screen readers, screen magnifiers, switch access devices, voice control software, and braille displays for computer and web access.
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ATAG is a W3C standard that provides guidelines for making authoring tools both accessible to authors with disabilities and capable of producing accessible web content.
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Audio description is a narration track added to video content that describes important visual information, actions, and scene changes during natural pauses in dialogue, making video accessible to people who are blind or have low vision.
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A hardware device that translates digital text into tactile braille characters using small pins that raise and lower, allowing blind and deaf-blind users to read screen content through touch.
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Captions are synchronized text overlays that display spoken dialogue and relevant sounds in video content, while transcripts are full text documents of audio or video content, both essential for deaf and hard-of-hearing users.
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Cognitive accessibility refers to the design of digital content and interfaces so they are usable by people with cognitive, intellectual, learning, and neurological disabilities, including conditions that affect memory, attention, problem-solving, and comprehension.
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A condition in which a person's ability to distinguish certain colors is reduced, most commonly affecting the perception of red and green hues.
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Color contrast ratio is a mathematical measurement of the luminance difference between foreground text and its background color, used by WCAG to ensure text is readable for people with low vision or color vision deficiencies.
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The practice of ensuring that individual UI components such as buttons, forms, modals, and menus are fully usable by people with disabilities through proper semantics, keyboard support, and ARIA implementation.
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A court-approved legal agreement between parties in a lawsuit that resolves the dispute without an admission of liability, often including specific accessibility requirements and timelines.
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Consistent Help is a WCAG 2.2 criterion requiring that help mechanisms like contact information, chat, and FAQ links appear in the same relative location across all pages of a website.
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The practice of embedding accessibility standards, guidelines, and testing into every layer of a design system, from design tokens and components to documentation and governance.
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Under the ADA, a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a record of such an impairment, or being regarded as having such an impairment.
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The U.S. federal agency responsible for enforcing the Americans with Disabilities Act, issuing ADA regulations, and bringing legal action against entities that violate disability rights laws.
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DOM order refers to the sequence in which HTML elements appear in the Document Object Model, which directly affects how assistive technologies read and navigate content.
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The Dragging Movements criterion requires that any functionality using drag-and-drop has a non-dragging alternative, ensuring users who cannot perform drag operations can still complete the task.
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The federal agency responsible for enforcing workplace anti-discrimination laws, including Title I of the ADA, which prohibits employment discrimination against people with disabilities.
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A WCAG 2.2 success criterion that sets minimum requirements for the visibility of keyboard focus indicators, ensuring users can always see which element is currently focused.
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A focus indicator is a visible outline or highlight that shows which interactive element on a web page currently has keyboard focus, enabling users who navigate without a mouse to track their position.
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Focus management is the practice of programmatically controlling which element receives keyboard focus, ensuring a logical and predictable navigation experience for keyboard and assistive technology users.
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A focus trap is a technique that confines keyboard focus within a specific UI component, such as a modal dialog, preventing users from tabbing to elements outside it until the component is dismissed.
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Form labels are text descriptions associated with form controls that identify the purpose of each input field, enabling screen readers to announce what information is expected and providing a larger click target for all users.
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A legal defense under the ADA where an organization argues that a requested accessibility modification would change the essential nature of its program, service, or activity.
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A web development approach where a fully featured experience is built first, then fallbacks are added to ensure basic functionality remains available when advanced features are unsupported.
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A partial or total inability to hear, ranging from mild hearing loss to profound deafness, that affects a person's ability to perceive audio content.
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An operating system or browser setting that overrides default colors to increase the contrast between text, backgrounds, and interface elements, helping users with low vision or light sensitivity perceive content more easily.
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Job Access With Speech (JAWS) is the most widely used commercial screen reader for Windows, developed by Freedom Scientific, that converts on-screen content to speech or braille output for blind and visually impaired users.
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Keyboard navigation is the ability to use a website or application entirely through keyboard input — using Tab, Enter, arrow keys, and other keys — without requiring a mouse, which is essential for users with motor disabilities and screen reader users.
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Semantic regions that identify the major sections of a web page, allowing screen reader users to quickly navigate to and between content areas.
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ARIA attributes that allow dynamically updated content to be announced by screen readers without requiring the user to navigate to the changed area.
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A condition that limits a person's physical functioning, mobility, dexterity, or stamina, affecting their ability to interact with digital and physical environments.
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The natural variation in human brain function and behavioral traits, encompassing conditions such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and other cognitive differences.
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NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) is a free, open-source screen reader for Windows that enables blind and visually impaired users to access computers through synthesized speech and braille output.
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The division within the U.S. Department of Education responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws in educational settings, including disability rights under Section 504 and Title II of the ADA.
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A curated collection of reusable UI design patterns and components that document best practices, including accessibility requirements, for consistent implementation across a product or organization.
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A neurological condition in which seizures are triggered by flashing lights, rapid visual transitions, or certain visual patterns, posing serious health risks in digital environments.
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The POUR principles — Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust — are the four foundational pillars of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) that organize all accessibility requirements into categories ensuring web content can be seen, used, comprehended, and interpreted by all users and technologies.
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A programmatic label is a text label that is associated with a user interface element through code, enabling assistive technologies to identify the element and announce its purpose to users.
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A web development strategy that starts with a baseline of functional, accessible HTML content and then layers on advanced features like CSS styling and JavaScript interactivity for browsers that support them.
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An accessibility preference and CSS media query that allows users to indicate they prefer minimal or no animation, helping people with vestibular disorders, motion sensitivity, or seizure conditions avoid discomfort or harm.
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Redundant Entry is a WCAG 2.2 criterion that requires information previously entered by or provided to the user during a process to be auto-populated or available for selection, rather than requiring the user to re-enter it.
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Reflow is the ability of web content to adapt and rearrange itself when the viewport is resized or zoomed to 400%, without requiring horizontal scrolling or loss of content and functionality.
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The process of identifying and fixing accessibility barriers in digital content, websites, or applications to bring them into compliance with WCAG and legal requirements.
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The role attribute defines what an element is or does in a web page, allowing assistive technologies to communicate the element's purpose to users when native HTML semantics are insufficient.
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Assistive technology that enlarges a portion of the screen display, allowing people with low vision to read text and see interface elements that would otherwise be too small to perceive.
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A screen reader is assistive technology software that converts on-screen text, images, and interface elements into synthesized speech or braille output, enabling people who are blind or visually impaired to use computers and navigate websites.
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Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibits disability discrimination by any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance, making it one of the earliest and most broadly applied federal disability rights laws.
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Section 508 is a provision of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 that requires federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities, including federal websites, software, documents, and digital services.
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Semantic HTML uses HTML elements according to their intended meaning rather than their visual appearance, enabling assistive technologies to correctly interpret and convey page structure, content relationships, and interactive behaviors.
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Sign language interpretation in web accessibility refers to providing a sign language interpreter or avatar alongside audio or video content, making spoken information accessible to deaf users who rely on sign language as their primary language.
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Skip navigation is an accessibility feature that provides a link at the top of a web page allowing keyboard users to bypass repetitive content like headers and navigation menus and jump directly to the main content.
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A collaborative, non-adversarial dispute resolution process used to resolve accessibility issues without filing a lawsuit, pioneered by disability rights attorney Lainey Feingold.
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An assistive technology method that allows people with severe motor disabilities to operate computers and mobile devices using one or more switches instead of a keyboard or touchscreen.
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Tab order is the sequence in which interactive elements on a web page receive keyboard focus when a user presses the Tab key, and it should follow a logical, predictable flow that matches the visual layout.
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Tabindex is an HTML attribute that controls whether an element can receive keyboard focus and its position in the sequential tab navigation order.
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Google's built-in screen reader for Android devices that provides spoken feedback and gesture-based navigation, enabling blind and visually impaired users to interact with Android phones and tablets.
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Target size refers to the minimum dimensions of interactive elements like buttons and links, ensuring they are large enough to be activated accurately by users with motor impairments or those using touch devices.
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A text alternative is a textual description that serves as a substitute for non-text content such as images, videos, audio, and charts, making the information accessible to people who cannot perceive the original format.
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UAAG is a W3C standard that provides guidelines for making web browsers, media players, and other user agents accessible to people with disabilities.
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A legal defense under disability rights law where an organization argues that a specific accessibility requirement would impose significant difficulty or expense relative to its resources.
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The Unruh Civil Rights Act is a California state law that guarantees full and equal access to all business establishments, including websites, and has become a major vehicle for digital accessibility lawsuits.
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A decreased ability to see that is not correctable by standard means such as glasses or contact lenses, ranging from low vision to complete blindness.
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Assistive technology that allows users to operate computers and mobile devices using spoken commands, enabling people with motor disabilities to navigate, type, and interact without a keyboard or mouse.
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Apple's built-in screen reader available on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS that enables blind and visually impaired users to interact with Apple devices through spoken descriptions and gestures.
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The practice of an organization proactively meeting accessibility standards and legal requirements without being compelled by a lawsuit, enforcement action, or formal complaint.
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A VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) is a standardized document that explains how a digital product or service conforms to accessibility standards, primarily used in government and enterprise procurement to evaluate whether technology meets Section 508 and WCAG requirements.
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The W3C is the international standards organization that develops web standards, including WCAG and WAI-ARIA, to ensure the long-term growth and accessibility of the World Wide Web.
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WAI is the W3C's initiative dedicated to developing strategies, standards, and resources to make the web accessible to people with disabilities, including WCAG, WAI-ARIA, ATAG, and UAAG.
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WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications) is a W3C specification that defines attributes to enhance the accessibility of dynamic web content and custom UI components for assistive technology users.
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WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is a set of internationally recognized technical standards published by the W3C that defines how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities, organized around four principles: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust.
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WCAG 2.0 is the second major version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, published in 2008 by the W3C, establishing four principles and 61 success criteria that became the global foundation for web accessibility standards.
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WCAG conformance levels are three tiers of accessibility compliance—A, AA, and AAA—that define increasingly rigorous standards for making web content accessible to people with disabilities.
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Web accessibility is the practice of designing and developing websites, tools, and technologies so that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, interact with, and contribute to the web equally and independently.
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