Archaeological Annual Monitoring Statement 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 Archaeological Annual Monitoring Statement documents which are in PDF format.

The benefits of creating an accessible version of this PDF would be:

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

The annual reports are required to publish statistics about the impact of development on the archaeological resource.

In the historic documents there are a large number of pages containing tables, maps, diagrams, charts, numbers and statistics.

Due to the length of the documents, we estimate that it would take 1.5 working days to make each PDF fully accessible and this would place an undue burden on the team who would be tasked with doing the work.

Also relevant to this decision are that:

• Requests for additionally accessible versions are rare - No residents have requested an accessible version of a previous version of the document
• The documents are historic reports so interest in the documents is relatively low and targeted to specific groups
• The documents do meet accessibility requirements for a large number of users, although some groups will find it disproportionately difficult
• We have and will always assist with accessible versions on request

Due to the requirements of the report documents, they contain 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 1.5 working days to create a fully accessible version of each of the documents and this would place an undue burden on the Council, given the small number views received per year.

However all new monitoring reports will be created in an accessible format.

9 January 2026