Presentation Independence

The principle that information should be stored and served in formats that can be rendered in visual, auditory, or electronic text form without loss of meaning. Presentation-independent content has no inherent visual or auditory presentation and can be adapted to the needs of different users, including those with disabilities. ASCII text is the simplest example, as it can be displayed visually, read aloud by a speech synthesizer, or rendered in braille. This concept is foundational to modern web accessibility, underpinning the WCAG principle of perceivability and the separation of content from presentation in HTML and CSS.