Oxford Source Apportionment Study - February 2025 document - 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 Oxford Source Apportionment Study - February 2025 document which is in PDF format.

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 report has been produced by a third-party (Ricardo Energy & Environment), which makes compliance with accessibility rules much more difficult to control. 

The report is also quite extensive (68 pages) and very complex in nature, with a significant amount of technical analysis, charts and data tables, which would take more time to convert into accessible formats.

We estimate that it would take around 34 hours to make this document fully compliant with accessibility rules based on an estimated time of around 30 minutes per page. This would place an undue burden on the work of the Environmental Quality Team, who would be tasked to do all this work.

Also relevant to this decision are that:

• We are legally required to make the document available to the public (under the Environment Act 1995 and the LAQM regime), so the document must be published on the Council’s website
• Given the nature of its content and that it contains the results of a quantification of the contribution of air pollution emissions by sector of activity in Oxford, which is of valuable interest to members, officers and members of the public, there is the need to publish this document in a timely fashion, so we took the decision to publish the PDF
• In 2019 we published a similar Oxford Source Apportionment Study document and to date we have never received any requests for an accessible version of the report
• Should any data from the report be requested in an accessible format, we will be happy to assist

Due to the nature of the document it contains a high number of charts and tables which take more time to convert to an accessible format than text alone.

We assess that the time it would take to convert the document to an accessible version would place an undue burden on the council.

However, should there be a request for information contained within the document in an accessible format, we will be able to provide the data in text format.

We will also make the key findings from the report available to the public via a detailed press release as HTML content.

11 February 2025