New Local Plan evidence – July 2024

As of September 2018, accessibility legislation states that public sector websites must publish content in an accessible format. 

The benefits of creating an HTML version of these PDFs would be:

• a fully accessible version for all users to access
• an easily searchable and indexable version

We’ve estimated that it would take around 10 months of our design team’s work to make these PDFs fully accessible (based on the estimate of 15 minutes work per page).

The Local Plan must be available to the public, so we took the decision to publish the PDFs as a means to making these documents available. 

• We have linked to existing accessible versions of documents where possible.
• We have remediated documents for accessibility where time has allowed.
• A large number of the documents are from third-party sources or organisations.
• A previous assessment on new local plan evidence saw that the page had relatively low traffic.

Having considered the estimated effort involved in creating HTML versions, along with the low amount of page views and downloads, we have concluded that the work required is beyond the resources available to us. This represents a disproportionate burden on the organisation.