External Auditor Annual Reports and Audit Completion Reports 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 the External Auditor Annual Reports and Audit Completion Reports 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

External Auditor Annual Reports 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 External Auditor Report document would take around 3 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 external auditor reports need 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.  The document is produced in its published form by the Council’s external auditors and must be published as it is produced in order to comply with the legal requirements to make the reports produced by the external auditor available to the public.  In changing the format of the documents the Council would not be in compliance with the legal requirements to publish the reports as a complete document on its website in the form used by 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 from a third-party source or organisation

This is a technical document used for assurance purposes and is a formal document produced by the Council’s external auditors 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.