OM Principle

A design principle for accessible digital content stating that any digital object is made more accessible by using the application's designated object model for that content rather than visual workarounds. For example, graph titles should be entered in the graphing application's title field rather than placed as floating text boxes, ensuring assistive technologies can programmatically identify the title's function. Proposed by Ferres et al. (2008) based on analysis of 120 statistical graphs from Statistics Canada, the principle generalises to any authoring context where semantic structure can be preserved through proper use of application features.