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Business case for making PDFs accessible (is there one)?

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From: Birkir RĂșnar Gunnarsson
Date: Oct 12, 2010 3:48AM


Hey there good listers

I am campaigning to make government and major commercial organizations
in my home country of Iceland do something about the accessibility of
their documents (forms and other public documents).
PDF is the format of choice and I know it can be made very accessible
with correct and sufficient tagging.
Of course there are accessibility and equal rights reasons to
encourage the extra work be done to achieve document accessibility,
but is there additional business benefits that could be used to sell
the tagging to organizations.
Are there possibilities for automatic exporting of data from the
document or other benefits that could be touted as a result of doing
the extra work on the documents themselves?
With web accessibility a reasonably strong case can be made with lower
maintenance cost and SEO, but to what extent can that be claimed to
apply to pdf documents.
If anyone has dealt with a similar problem or has ideas they are always welcome.
Thanks
-Birkir