Fees and Charges 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 of the Fees and Charges documents which are published 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 Fees and Charges document 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. 

Each document is approximately 45 pages long. The time it would take to make the document accessible is approximately 1 working day. This length of time is disproportionate to the demand.

Also relevant to this decision are that:

• 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
• Most of the content in the most recent document is available on other pages of our website in an accessible format (HTML)

Due to the length of the document and amount of data contained within it, we assess that the time involved in creating a fully accessible version of the documents would place an undue burden on the Council, given the small number views received per year.

Most of the content in the most recent document is also available on other pages of our website in an accessible format (HTML).

1 April 2025