Archaeological work summaries documents - Disproportionate burden assessments for digital accessibility

Scope

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 work summaries (Reports to the Oxford City and County Archaeological Forum) documents which are in PDF format.

The following documents are covered by the assessment - all other documents are either accessible or exempt:

Benefits of making accessible

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

Burden of making accessible

The task of making these historic reports accessible would take an estimated 0.5 working days at least. This is a significant demand on already time-pressured staff.

Other factors

Also relevant to this decision are that:

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
Requests for additionally accessible versions are rare - no residents have requested an accessible version of a previous version of the document
We have and will always assist with accessible versions on request

Assessment

Due to the requirements of the report documents, they contain a high number of photographs which take more time to convert to an accessible format than text alone.

We estimate that it would take 0.5 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 report documents will be created in an accessible format.

Date of assessment

9 January 2026

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