media

An image, table or code block bound to its caption so the two travel together and can be referred to from the running text.

A scrollable row of thumbnails beside a larger view, where picking one changes what the large view shows.

An embedded picture, sized and cropped by the layout around it, carrying the alternative text that stands in when it cannot be seen.

Two images stacked with a draggable divider that wipes between them, used to show a before and an after in one frame.

An overlay that shows one image or video large over a dimmed page, with next and previous controls and a dismiss.

The cluster of play, pause, skip, volume and fullscreen controls attached to a player, which usually hides itself while playing.

The marker showing the current position in a timeline or track, which travels during playback and can be dragged to move it.

The seek control of a media player: a track showing elapsed and buffered time with a playhead you drag to move through it.

A small stand-in image for a larger one, cropped rather than letterboxed so a row of them lines up.

A framed video with the controls needed to play, seek, mute and caption it, sized so the controls never crowd the picture.

An audio track drawn as a row of amplitude bars, used both to show what is in the file and as the surface you scrub along.

A container that holds a fixed width to height proportion whatever its size, so media reserves its space before it loads.

A photo grid that scales and trims images so every row lands on one shared height with flush left and right edges, unlike masonry's ragged columns.

Filling the mismatch between content shape and frame shape with bars: above and below for letterbox, at the sides for pillarbox.

How a picture or video is resized inside a box whose shape it does not match: stretched to fill, letterboxed to fit whole, or cropped to cover every edge.

A small always on top window that keeps video or navigation visible in a corner while the reader works in another app or scrolls another page.

Playback that starts with no gesture from the reader, which browsers now allow only while the sound is off, so autoplay in practice means a silent moving picture.

Deferring the fetch of an image, list section, or module until it is about to be needed, usually when it approaches the viewport.

Showing a cheap stand-in for an image, a blur, a dominant colour, or a low resolution copy, and swapping in the full file once it arrives.

A sequence of full-screen cards that advance on a timer, paused by holding, skipped by tapping the edges, and gone after a fixed lifetime.

Alt text given size, colour and weight so a mail whose images are blocked still reads as something designed instead of as a column of grey stubs.

A treatment that makes digital imagery look shot on film, adding grain, halation, light leaks, faded contrast, dust, and sometimes a corner date stamp.

A look that imitates a worn videotape: tracking bands, smeared color bleeding past edges, interlace comb artifacts, and burned-in timecode or REC overlays.

Dragging a playhead along a timeline to move through media by hand, previewing frames as the position changes rather than waiting for playback.

Borrowing the camera's vocabulary: dolly moves the viewer through the scene, zoom scales the scene itself, and the interface reads as travelling rather than rearranging.

A slow pan and zoom across a still image that gives it motion, named after the documentary filmmaker who made the technique famous.

A transition where a moving edge or mask travels across the frame, replacing what was there with what comes next.

An image rendered in two colours instead of full colour, mapping its shadows to one hue and its highlights to another so photography joins the brand palette.

A gradual darkening toward the edges of an image that pulls the eye to the centre, borrowed from lens falloff and applied deliberately for focus and mood.

The text alternative that stands in for an image, written to serve the same purpose in the same context rather than to describe every detail.

A way to stop sound that started on its own, because autoplaying audio drowns out the screen reader voice a reader depends on to find the control that stops it.

A narration track describing visual information the soundtrack leaves out, fitted into the gaps between dialogue.

Synchronised text for a video's audio, including speaker changes and meaningful sound, distinct from subtitles which only translate dialogue.

An image that carries no information and is given an empty alt attribute so assistive technology skips it entirely.

Text baked into a raster image, which cannot be resized, restyled, selected, translated, or read by anything but the alt attribute someone remembered to write.

An extended text alternative for a chart, diagram, or map, linked or referenced because a short alt string cannot carry the content.

A signed track alongside video, presented as an inset or a companion stream, for readers whose first language is a sign language rather than the written caption text.

A full text version of time based media, readable without playing it and searchable by both people and machines.