Annual Lettings Plan document - 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 Annul Lettings Plan document which is in PDF format.

The benefits of creating HTML versions of these Portable Document Formats (PDFs) would be:

• fully accessible versions for all users to access
• easily searchable and indexable versions

Given the number of charts and tables within the documents and the length of it, we estimate that it would take 2 working days to make the PDF fully accessible and this would not be a good use of resources.

Also relevant to this decision are that:

• We are legally required to make the Annual Lettings Plan available to the public, so the document must be published on the Council’s website
• Due to the nature of the content - some of the data does need to be provided in tabular form
• Requests for additionally accessible versions are rare - there have been no requests from residents requesting an accessible version of these documents in the past
• The document does meet accessibility requirements for a large number of users, although some groups may find it disproportionately difficult
• We can help to provide more accessible versions of most of the content within the document if any is not clear on request (or explain the data shown in tabular form if this is not possible)

Based on the above – we assess that changing the whole document to a more accessible format would be a disproportionate burden and not a good use of resources.

Mitigations are in place to help provide accessible versions of specific content if requested in the future.  

6 November 2025