Annual Statement of Accounts documents - Disproportionate burden assessments for digital accessibility

Accessibility legislation states that public sector websites must publish content in an accessible format, unless doing so would impose a disproportionate burden on the organisation. If that is the case, an assessment of the extent to which compliance with the accessibility requirement imposes a disproportionate burden must be carried out.

This is a Disproportionate Burden Assessment for each of the Annual Statement of Accounts documents.

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

The statement of accounts is produced on an annual basis, so it would take a disproportionate amount of a content designer's time to create a new HTML version of this PDF document each year.

We’ve estimated that each Statement of Accounts document would take around 10 days for out content team to make fully accessible (based on the length and complexity of the documents).

There is a statutory deadline by which the Council's statement of accounts needs to be published on its external website so each year there would be a very limited timeframe after the accounts have been produced and to then convert the information into HTML before the statutory deadline.  In changing the format of the document the Council would not be in compliance with the legal requirements to publish its statement of accounts as a complete document on its website in the format approved by Audit and Governance Committee and as presented to the Council’s External Auditors.

Also relevant to this decision are that:

• We are legally required to make the document available to the public, so the document must be published on the Council’s website
• Requests for additionally accessible versions have never been received – no residents requested an accessible version of a previous version of the document
• The document does meet accessibility requirements for a large number of users, although some groups will find it disproportionately difficult
• The document is formatted in a way to be compliant with the Code of Practice on Local Authority Accounting published by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy and International Financial Reporting Standards

This is a technical document used for assurance purposes and so it should continue to be uploaded as a PDF.

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

6 December 2024