Technical Advisory Note 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 16 Technical Advisory Note (TAN) documents which  are in PDF format.

The benefits of creating accessible versions of these PDFs would be:

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

Due to the complexity of the diagrams, illustrations and tables in these documents, we’ve estimated that it would take 23 days of a content designer’s time to create accessible versions of these PDFs (assuming an average of 30 minutes of work per page).

Also relevant to this decision are that:

• We are legally required to make the documents available to the public, so the documents will be published on the Council’s website
• Interest in the documents is low
• The document does meet accessibility requirements for the majority of users, although some groups will find it disproportionately difficult
• We will assist with accessible versions on request

Having considered the estimated effort involved in making the tables and diagrams fully accessible, along with the low demand to date, we have concluded that the work involved would be a poor use of staff time. However, we will assist with accessible versions if requested.

16 January 2026