Scope

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

31 documents were published on our New local plan evidence page on 22 September 2021. These were all published as inaccessible PDFs.

Benefits of creating an accessible version

The benefits of creating an HTML version of this PDF would be:

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

Burden

We’ve estimated that it would take around 4 months of our design team’s work to make these PDFs fully accessible (based on the estimate of 15 minutes work per page).

Other factors

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.

In the three months leading up to publication of the documents, the New Local Plan Evidence page had been accessed 177 times, with users downloading documents on 93 occasions. This suggests interest in the content is relatively low.

Assessment

Having considered the estimated effort involved in creating an HTML version, 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.