All Points Addressable (APA), in the context of a video monitor, dot matrix or any display device consisting of a pixel array, refers to an arrangement bits or cells which can be individually manipulated, as opposed to rewriting the whole array every time a pixel changes.
Generally, text modes are not all-points-addressable, whereas graphics modes are. With the advent of more powerful computer graphics hardware, the use and importance of text-only display modes has declined, and with graphics modes it is generally taken for granted that they are all-points-addressable.