Littlemore Neighbourhood Plan 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 the 27 Littlemore Neighbourhoood Plan documents which are in PDF and MS Excel 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 documents relate to submissions for a neighbourhood plan for the Littlemore area, and have been provided by a locally based working group acting on behalf of the parish council.

The documents include draft text for the plan, summaries of comments and representations, and other evidence as they deem relevant.

While the City Council provides support and guidance during the development of the plan, the process is intended to be led and directed by the groups themselves through the initial stages up until the stage where the Council is required to perform statutory function.

There are no specific requirements we are aware of for neighbourhood forums in relation to the formats or accessibility for submitted documents. An independent examination for the plan has commenced and the examiner has been sent the documents as submitted.

The expectation is that the documents are made publicly available as part of the Council’s statutory duties and with the added time constraints of meeting the examination schedule we do not have the capacity to convert these documents into accessible versions.

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
• An examination process is ongoing and the documents have been submitted ‘as is’ to an external examiner
• Interest in the documents is expected to be relatively low
• Thus far we have not received requests for additionally accessible versions of the documents in this folder
• The documents do meet accessibility requirements for a large number of users, although some groups will find it disproportionately difficult
• A number of the documents are representations from third party sources and organisations, including statutory bodies
• We have and will always assist with accessible versions on request

Among the submitted documents are results from surveys carried out by the parish council which are presented in many instances as excel spreadsheets.

Their draft plan document includes several elements - tables, charts, pictures and text formatted into columns - that may make accessibility difficult.

As these form part of the submission to the independent examiner, any upgrades or replacements would best be carried out after the examination has been completed. Documents can be upgraded or, where not deemed to be required, can be removed from the webpages.

Historically we rarely if ever receive requests for additionally accessible versions of the documents relating to neighbourhood plans in general, however we will provide suitable versions on request.

Having considered the estimated effort involved in creating accessibile versions, along with the low amount of expected downloads, we have concluded that the work required is beyond the resources available to us. This represents a disproportionate burden on the organisation.

25 April 2025