In May 2009, Bloor Research released a Market Update on the subject of The Creation of Accessible Documents.

There is a continuing and growing pressure on organisations to enhance the accessibility of their goods and services. There are legal, financial and moral benefits to accessibility. The benefits are greater if the cost of implementation is kept under control.

Providing information electronically has now become an essential part of all organisations. This means the internet site must be accessible to people with disabilities and this includes any PDF documents available on the site.

Unfortunately most PDF files available via the web are not accessible. This Market Update looks at the reasons for this and the tools available for producing accessible PDF. It concludes that there are commercial available tools that have the potential to produce accessible PDF and therefore there is now no reason for new documents not to be accessible.

The report compares and contrasts the functions of the different products and should assist an organisation in deciding the best product(s) to support their environment.

The report covers all the products that Bloor Research has identified as helping to create accessible PDF, these are from Adobe, Lotus, Microsoft, NetCentric, Nuance and OpenOfiice.Org.

The Market Update is available free of charge 0n the Bloor website.