Annual Workforce Equalities Report documents - Disproportionate burden assessments for digital accessibility

Accessibility legislation (on legislation.gov.uk website) 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 Annual Workforce Equalities Report which are in PDF format.

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

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

Given the high number of charts and tables within the document and the length of it (25 pages), we estimate that it would take about 2 working days to make this PDF fully accessible and this would place an undue burden on the People Servies Team who would be tasked with doing the work.

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
• Due to the nature of this content, there was a need to publish the document quickly, so we took the decision to publish the PDF as a temporary measure
• Interest in the document is low
• Requests for additionally accessible versions are rare – there have been no request sin the last two years from residents requesting 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
• We have and will always assist with accessible versions on request

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 estimate that it would take 2 working days to create a fully accessible version of each of the documents and this would place an undue burden on the Council, given the small number views received per year.

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.

28 February 2025