Indices of Deprivation 2025 Oxford Report 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 the Indices of Deprivation 2025 Oxford Report document which is 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

We make the most recent data on the Indices of Deprivation 2025 available to the public and therefore have taken the decision to publish the PDF as a way of making the report available. 

However, given the high number of charts, tables and maps within the document and the length of it (17 pages long), we estimate that it would take about 10 to 12 hours of work to make these PDFs fully accessible (based on an estimate of about 36 to 42 minutes per page) and this would place an undue burden on the Business Intelligence Unit who would be tasked with doing the work. 

Also relevant to this decision are that: 

• Due to the nature of this content and that it contains insights, which are of interest to members, officers and members of the public there was a need to publish the document in a timely fashion, so we took the decision to publish the PDF. 
• We published a PDF version of the Indices of Deprivation 2019 on our website in 2019 and to date we have not received any requests for an accessible version of the report.  
• Should any data from the report in an accessible format be requested, we will be happy to assist.  

Due to the nature of the document, it contains a high number of charts, maps and tables which take more time to convert to an accessible format than text alone.

We estimate that it would take about 10 to 12 hours of work to make these PDF fully accessible and this would place an undue burden on the Business Intelligence Unit who would be tasked with doing the work. 

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.  

We will provide key findings from the Indices of Deprivation 2025 report as bullet points in HTML format on our website. 

8 December 2025