Glossary

What’s this about?

The Glossary is where I will add definitions of words that I am using in a particular restricted or unusual context, so I can link frm the post where I use the word to the relevant entry on this page for the definition or explanation of the word concerned.

The Words

Assistive Technology
any item, piece of equipment, or product system, whether acquired commercially or off the shelf, modified, or customized, that is used to increase, maintain, or improve functional capabilities of individuals with disabilities.
Lower secondary education level
the two or three year period of education that begins after completion of six years of school and ends nine years after the beginning of primary education.
munging
the practise of making an email address unreadable to spam harvesters while still being readable or usable to humans, e.g. using character entities to encode some of the characters, adding NOSPAM or similar to the address (which a human would know to remove), or using more complex css obfuscation techniques. Munging (except for the css technique, which does not allow the use of mailto links) is almost never 100% effective. To secure your email address against spam, don’t publish it on the internet — use a comment form.
A self-referential link is a link that points to the current page. I do not consider the use of top links, skip navigation links etc to be self-referential links as these clearly point to a labelled part of a specific page. What I mean by a self-referential link is a link either in the body of the page, or in the navigation menu (most commonly in the navigation menu) that points back to the URL of the current page. It has been suggested that some users may get confused if they follow one of these links because they will have expected a different page to load. Some people believe you shouldn’t use self-referential links at all and should replace the appropriate link with plain text, some people believe you should use them because to replace them with plain text would be even more confusing for the user, and some people believe that you should use them but only if they are labelled in such a way as to make it obvious they point to the current page.
Tokenism
This is the policy or practice of limited inclusion of members of a minority group, usually creating a false appearance of inclusive practices, intentional or not.