As of September 2018, accessibility legislation states that public sector websites must publish content in an accessible format.
204 documents were published on a newly-created page about the St James public inquiry on 30 May 2023. These were all published as inaccessible PDFs.
The benefits of creating accessible versions of these PDFs would be:
There are a minimum of 3,162 pages within the public inquiry documents. Based on this, we’ve estimated that it would take around 3-4 months of our design team’s work to make these PDFs fully accessible (based on the estimate of 10 minutes work per page).
The documents relating to this inquiry must be published online, so we took the decision to publish the PDFs as a means to making these documents available.
The requirement for these documents to be available only applies during the inquiry, which will have concluded by the end of July 2023. Given the time estimate given for making the documents accessible, it is unfeasible that we would be able to remediate all 204 PDFs.
Having considered the estimated effort involved in creating accessible PDFs, along with the short window of time these documents need to be available, we have concluded that the work required is beyond the resources available to us. This represents a disproportionate burden on the organisation.
