Disproportionate burden assessment for PDFs

Scope

This assessment relates to the creation of an accessible version of the Council’s PDFs.

Benefits of creating an accessible version

The benefits of creating an HTML version of our PDFs would be:

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

Burden placed on the organisation 

We have internally made an estimation on our content designer’s time taken to create 12 HTML versions of our PDFs. Although there are many more that need creating, we wanted to gain an idea on how long this would take.

We estimated that this would take just over 100 hours. To verify this estimation we contacted a third party to also give an estimate. They quoted 124.5 hours to create these 12 HTML versions of our PDFs.

Contributing factors

Other factors relevant to this decision are:

• We use website analytics to see how often our PDFs are opened. We have found interest in our PDF subject matters are low. With 78% of them not being opened in the last 30 days.
• We have never received a request for an accessible version of a PDF document.
• We will continue to assist with accessible versions on request.
• We have a document reader on our website which can read PDFs.
• Our priority will be to remedy the PDFs which received over 50 views in the last 30 days and need to be remedied. There are currently 18 PDFs that meet this threshold.
• Once they are remedied we will consider if some of the PDFs that have not been viewed in the last 30 days can be removed. This makes up 78% of our PDFs.
• We will then look at PDFs which have been viewed less than 50 times and more than 20 times in the last 30 days and need to be remedied. We have seven PDFs which fall in to this category. 

Assessment

Having considered the estimated effort involved in creating HTML versions or fully accessible PDFs and along with the low demand, we have concluded that the work involved is needed but as a temporary measure we will need to keep the PDFs on our website; but continue working on the PDFs as part of our robust plan as mentioned above.