A syntactic analysis of accessibility to a corpus of statistical graphs

Designing graphs and charts visually by means of graphing applications such as OpenOffice or MS Excel is extremely efficient and cost-effective. However, one of the drawbacks of such approach is that graphs are sometimes involuntarily made less accessible by, for instance, using a text box as title. In this paper we evaluate a corpus of 120 ecologically-valid statistical graphs for accessibility problems, discuss possible algorithms to solve these problems and finally propose the OM (Object Model) Principle, which states that any digital object is made more accessible by simply using the application's model for that object: for instance, the TITLE field for the title text.