Glossary
These are the technical words and abbreviations used on this site, explained in plain words.
Technical words
- A11y
- A short way of writing accessibility. The 11 stands for the 11 letters between the a and the y.
- Accessibility auditor
- Someone trained to check websites and apps against accessibility guidelines, and to explain how to fix any problems they find.
- Airtime plan
- A monthly plan for calls, texts and data, without a phone.
- Analytics events
- Records of what people do on a website, such as choosing a phone, used to understand and improve it.
- Architecture spike
- A short piece of research into a technical approach, to help decide whether to use it.
- Audio description
- A spoken description of what’s happening on screen in a video, for people who can’t see it.
- Bug bash
- An event where people try to find as many problems as they can in a short time.
- Captions
- Text on a video showing everything that’s said, and other important sounds.
- Component
- A reusable piece of a website, such as a button or a card.
- Continuous integration and continuous delivery
- Automatically testing every change to the code, and releasing it once the tests pass.
- Cross-functional team
- A team with different skills in it, such as engineers, designers and product managers.
- Dark ride
- An indoor ride that carries people through scenes, often in the dark, with lighting, sound and effects.
- Design system
- A shared set of components, styles and rules, so every part of a website looks and works the same way.
- Employee network group
- A group of staff who share an experience or interest, who support each other and help the company improve.
- Event-driven architecture
- A way of building software where each part reacts to messages about things that happen, such as an order being placed.
- Feature flag
- A switch that turns a new feature on or off without changing the code.
- Frontend
- The part of a website that people see and use in their browser.
- Micro frontends
- Splitting a large website into smaller parts, so different teams can build and release them separately.
- Neurodiversity
- The natural differences in how people’s brains work. Neurodivergent people include autistic people, and people with dyslexia or dyspraxia.
- Observability and alerting
- Being able to see how live software is behaving, and being told automatically when something goes wrong.
- Pair programming
- Two engineers writing code together, sharing one screen.
- Pattern glare
- Discomfort, headaches or blurred vision that some people get from stripes and other busy patterns.
- Photosensitivity
- When flashing or flickering light can cause discomfort or seizures.
- Pigpen cipher
- A simple code that swaps each letter for a symbol, made from parts of a grid.
- Refactoring
- Improving how code is written without changing what it does.
- Screen reader
- Software that reads out what’s on the screen, used by many blind and partially sighted people.
- Test driven development
- Writing a test for what code should do before writing the code itself.
- Traffic migration
- Moving visitors from an old system to a new one, a little at a time.
- Transcript
- A written version of everything said in a talk. On this site, it also describes the slides, where I still have them.
- You build it, you run it
- A way of working where the team that builds a piece of software also looks after it once it’s live.
Abbreviations
These are the abbreviations used on this site, and what they stand for.
- ADHD
- attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
- AI
- artificial intelligence
- API
- application programming interface
- ARIA
- Accessible Rich Internet Applications
- BA
- Bachelor of Arts
- BTEC
- Business and Technology Education Council
- CI/CD
- continuous integration and continuous delivery
- CSS
- Cascading Style Sheets
- CTO
- Chief Technology Officer
- CV
- curriculum vitae
- DOM
- Document Object Model
- GAAD
- Global Accessibility Awareness Day
- GDPR
- General Data Protection Regulation
- HAND
- Home of Accessibility and NeuroDiversity
- HTML
- HyperText Markup Language
- MFE
- micro frontend
- OCD
- obsessive-compulsive disorder
- Portable Document Format
- PR
- pull request
- QR
- Quick Response
- SEO
- search engine optimisation
- SIM
- subscriber identity module
- SQL
- Structured Query Language
- TDD
- test driven development
- UK
- United Kingdom
- URL
- uniform resource locator
- W3C
- World Wide Web Consortium
- WCAG
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines