Glossary

Short for "accessibility." There are 11 letters between the a and y in the word accessibility, so at times, it can be a useful shortening.

Note: We recommend spelling out accessibility wherever possible, and using shorthand for more informal, internal communication.

A label that aids assistive technology users who cannot rely on the product's visual interface by identifying controls and UI elements that otherwise wouldn’t be read aloud. The aria-label and aria-labelledby attributes are most frequently used to identify controls.

Also referred to as: "ARIA label," "screen reader label," or simply "label."

Accessibility Conformance Reports (ACRs) are the most common way of demonstrating how information and communication technology (ICT) products such as software, hardware, websites, and other electronic content conform to specified accessibility standards.

Assessment of Google Usability Accessibility (AGUA) is a program measuring the overall usability and health of a product for people with disabilities. AGUA can be used to evaluate your product at any stage in the product development lifecycle.

Learn more at go/AGUA

Alternative text, or alt text, is the written copy that describes an image. It's sometimes displayed in place of the image in browsers if the image file hasn't loaded, or when the user has chosen not to view images. This text helps screen-reading tools describe images to users with visual impairments or users who are blind, and people with certain sensory processing and/or learning disabilities.

Learn how to create appropriate alt text based on the purpose of an image at W3C Image Concepts Guidelines.

Accessible Rich Internet Applications - ARIA allows you to add extra semantic information recognized by assistive technology, for example a screen reader for users who are blind, or voice control software for users with motor impairments. It is a set of attributes that define ways to make web content and web applications more accessible to people with disabilities. For example, if you want to build a custom control that works like a checkbox, adding ARIA attributes allows assistive technology and automation tools to identify whether the form field is in the checked state or not.

A type of ARIA role (see below) that denotes a region on a page to which the assistive technology user may want quick access.
Content in such a region is relevant to a specific user purpose, such as navigating, searching, etc. Using ARIA landmarks provides programmatic access to sections of a web page.

For details, visit W3C ARIA Landmarks Guidelines.

An ARIA live region announces changes to the content of an element.

For details on available live regions and when to use them, reference W3C ARIA Live Guidelines.

ARIA roles, such as role=button, indicate how assistive technology can interact with a UI element. They inform users how a UI element will behave in an expected way.

Learn more in the W3C Definitions of Roles.

ARIA states and properties, such as aria-checked, provide specific information about how a UI element changes based on user action.

Software or hardware that helps people with disabilities have full access to computing devices. A screen reader allows a user who is blind to access a computer by describing the screen using synthesized speech or braille. Software for users with low-vision might magnify the screen one section at a time and transform the colors to increase contrast. A user with a motor impairment might use voice-control software or a switch device that they can control with only their head, combined with software to scan the screen one item at a time.

An auditory narration that describes visual information in a video or multimedia product and can be particularly helpful for users who are blind, or have low vision, as well as people with cognitive and motor disabilities, to understand and interact with the content.

Text representation of the auditory content of video or audio that displays synchronously with the media, and allows the media to be accessible to people who can't hear all of the audio.

A type of element on mobile used to interact with the product, such as checkboxes, radio buttons, icons, tabs with icons, icons with a state, switches, sliders, text fields, ratings, and buttons. The control type communicates to the users and assistive technologies the type of interaction that the control affords.

Images or content that do not add unique or critical information to the content of the page. For example, the information provided by the image might already be given using adjacent text, or the object might be included to make the website more visually attractive.

A cross-platform and language-independent, object-oriented representation of a web page that can be used to access and modify the web page.

Learn more about DOM.

Keyboard focus refers to the interactive element (such as a field, checkbox, button, or link) that currently receives keyboard input.Screen reader focus regards to the current item being read by the screen reader. This can be an interactive element, static text, or a region.

Clear, visible, focus indicators allow users to know where they are on a page.

Visit WCAG 2.4.11 Focus Appearance for details.

GAR, short for Google Accessibility Rating, is a scale measuring a software product's level of technical accessibility. 

A common task that a user will perform when interacting with a product. The GAR use case can be applied for the purposes of GAR testing.

A device that can be plugged into the keyboard port of a server to emulate the presence of a connected keyboard.

You can use the rotor to change VoiceOver settings, jump from one item to the next on the screen, select special input methods such as Braille Screen Input or Handwriting, and more.

Software that interfaces with a computer's graphical output to display enlarged screen content.

Assistive Technology (AT) that attempts to identify and interpret what's displayed on the screen, and then conveys the interpretation by rendering text and image content as speech or braille output. People who use screen readers may include users with visual impairments or who are blind and require audio or braille to understand what is on the screen. Popular screen readers in the US include JAWS and NVDA (Windows), VoiceOver (Mac OS X and iOS), ChromeVox (Chrome OS), TalkBack (Android), and Orca (Linux). Other Windows screen readers include HAL and SuperNova (from Dolphin Oceanic), 95Reader (Japanese only), and PC-Talker (Japanese only). Microsoft ships a basic built-in screen reader, Microsoft Narrator.

As the most basic building block of the Web, semantic HTML defines the meaning and structure of web content. HTML uses markup to annotate text, images, and other content for a Web browser. This allows assistive technologies to interact with elements in a standard and intuitive way.

Learn more: HTML: HyperText Markup Language, HTML Elements Reference.

Provides a way for people who use keyboards or screen readers to avoid what can often be many navigation links, and "skip" straight to the main content.

Visit the WebAIM article on skip links for more information.

Hardware or software for people with limited mobility to interact with various communication and mobility devices. Switch devices provide navigation and shortcut key mapping to move through mobile app content.

The linear navigation path that the keyboard focus follows when pressing the Tab key, which generally moves element by element before advancing to the next line, line by line. This involves using next line commands with a desktop screen reader.

Also known as: Tab order, traversal order, navigation order, or focus order.

Text representation of the speech and non-speech audio information of video or audio that include descriptions of all spoken words, important audio information (like laughter) and visual information (such as someone entering the room). Transcripts can be particularly helpful for users who are deaf or hard of hearing interact with the content.

VPAT is short for Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. It's a document that explains to governments and corporations how products meet the Revised 508 Standards for accessibility. 

The World Wide Web Consortium is the organization responsible for ARIA specifications and the WCAG accessibility standards.

A technical specification published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that specifies how to increase the accessibility of web pages, in particular, dynamic content and complex UIs. WAI ARIA extends the capabilities of HTML by adding new attributes. It's shorthand for Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Application, also often referred to as just ARIA

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the guidelines that are produced and maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and internationally adopted by most countries, and in the United States by most federal, state, and local governments.