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Ah, but it's also available as a series of web pages (which I'd assume/hope have been created in compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and therefore will be accessible to assistive technologies).
If you follow the links back, you'll see that this report stems from the Australian Government's "Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy" and, from my experience working in web accessibility here in the UK, most likely results from the tendency of local and national government departments to produce documents in PDF format and then put them on their website, without making the same content available in any other format (not even web pages). The underlying problem is that, more often than not, those producing various documents within a local authority or a government department are far removed from any awareness of web/document accessibility issues, but the web team don't have the time/staff resources to do all the work of making such documents accessible or converting them into alternative formats. So stuff ends up going up on the web as a PDF and nothing else. The problem that these web teams face is getting sufficient "buy in" from senior management to ensure appropriate training for staff in other departments, and sufficient resources to enable the web team to ensure that everything that goes up on the website is optimised for accessibility, either by creating accessible documents in the first place, or being able to create alternative formats to sit alongside the original documents.
I can foresee similar issues for large publishers, as ebooks become more and more "mainstream", and the requirement that the formats used for ebooks should be accessible to assistive technologies grows. This is just a guess on my part, but I suspect that, if anything is likely to push Amazon towards the EPUB format, it'll be growing pressure towards accessibility, and right now, EPUB is more likely to offer that than MOBI.
- Donna
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