Access barriers: Any obstruction that prevents people with disabilities from using standard facilities, equipment and resources. 

Accessibility: the degree to which a product, device , service, resource, or environment is available to a given user.

Accessible technology: technology that has been designed so that it can be accessed by all users. This includes electronic documents, websites, software, hardware, video, audio, and other technologies.

Accommodation: a reactive effort to strive to remove barriers caused by inaccessible design. This ensures people with disabilities have the same access as people without disabilities. 

Acute Trauma: A singular traumatic event that is brief in duration and narrowly focused in nature such a car accident or assault. Linked to Acute Stress Disorder, PTSD and other mental health conditions including Simple Phobias, anxiety, depressive, alcohol abuse and adjustment disorders.

Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA): a federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in everyday activities. 

Collective Trauma: Collective trauma refers to a traumatic event that is shared by a group of people. It may involve a small group, like a family, or it may involve an entire society.

Disability: a person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activity

Gaslighting: A form of psychological maltreatment in which a person comes to question the reality of their experience within a relationship. In such a dyad, the individual enacting the gaslighting behavior might deny or downplay hurtful incidents or patterns in the relationship when confronted, or may actively manipulate the victim to believe that their perceptions are inaccurate. 

Major life activities: Functions such as caring for oneself, performing manual tasks, walking, seeing, hearing, speaking, breathing, learning, working, and participating in community activities.

Neurodiversity: the idea that people experience and interact with the world around the in many different ways; there is no one “right” way of thinking, learning, and behaving, and differences are not viewed as deficits.

Person-First Language: a way to emphasize the person and view the disorder, disease, condition, or disability as only one part of the whole person. Describe what the person "has" rather than what the person "is." Person-first language avoids using labels or adjectives to define someone

Post-Traumatic Growth: the positive psychological change that some individuals experience after a life crisis or traumatic event. Post-traumatic growth doesn’t deny deep distress, but rather posits that adversity can unintentionally yield changes in understanding oneself, others, and the world.

Qualified individual with a disability: An individual with a disability who, with or without reasonable modification to rules, policies, or practices, the removal of architectural, communication, or transportation barriers, or the provision of auxiliary aids and services, meets the essential eligibility requirements for the receipt of services or the participation in programs or activities provided by a public entity.

Resilience: the capacity of individuals to navigate their way to the psychological, social, cultural, and physical resources that sustain their well-being, and their capacity individually and collectively to negotiate for these resources to be provided in culturally meaningful ways.

Secondary Trauma: a natural but disruptive by-product of working with traumatized clients. It is a set of observable reactions to working with people who have been traumatized and mirrors the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Many types of professionals, such as physicians, psychotherapists, human service workers, and emergency workers, are vulnerable to developing this type of stress, although only a subset of such workers experience it. 

Title IX: Protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance. 

Trauma: the lasting emotional response that often results from living through a distressing event. Experiencing a traumatic event can harm a person’s sense of safety, sense of self, and ability to regulate emotions and navigate relationships.

Universal Design: the process of creating products that are accessible to people with a wide range of abilities, disabilities, and other characteristics.