sound

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.

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.

An interface that accepts and answers in more than one channel at once, letting a person speak, type, touch, or point and pick whichever suits the moment.

An interface whose input is ordinary language, typed or spoken: the user states an intent in their own words and the system parses it, instead of picking from controls.

A paradigm where the screen stops being the interface and the interaction happens through voice, gesture, presence, or sensors, so the system responds without anything to look at.

A recorded everyday sound standing for an event, so a crumple means delete by resembling the act rather than by convention learned in the interface.

A brief synthesized sound standing for an event, abstract by design, so a rising figure means success only because the interface taught you it does.

A proposed API for speaking a message directly to assistive technology, without the live region trick of mutating hidden text and hoping the timing works out.

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.

How a synthetic voice says a word, and the hints an author can give when the default reading turns a product name, a units string, or a homograph into nonsense.

Speaking a page's own prose with a synthetic voice, highlighting each word as it is spoken. A reading aid for people who can see the screen, not a screen reader.

Software that speaks or brailles the accessibility tree and supplies its own keyboard commands for moving through a page.

Turning data into sound, mapping a series to pitch or rhythm, so a chart can be heard as a shape rather than described one value at a time.

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

Operating an interface by speaking control names or numbered overlays, which makes the visible wording of a control its address.