Statement of Community Involvement in Planning 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 Statement of Community Involvement (SCI) in Planning documents which are in PDF format.

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

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

The documents relate to the Regulation 18 Consultation for the 2042 Local Plan. The main document includes 43 pages, with five information boxes, five tables in different formats and a complicated flow diagram.     

The expectation is that the documents are made publicly available as part of the Council’s statutory duties; however, due to the length and variety of ways needed to clearly display the information we do not deem it suitable to convert this document into an accessible version.  

Also relevant to this decision are that: 

• We are legally required to make the document available to the public, so the document must be published on the Council’s website 
• We have not in the past received requests for additionally accessible versions of the document
• The document does meet accessibility requirements for a large number of users, although some groups will find it disproportionately difficult
• We will always assist with accessible versions on request

The documents include multiple elements - text, information boxes, diagrams, tables, and text formatted into columns - that may make accessibility difficult.

We estimate that it would take 2 working days to create fully accessible versions of the documents and this would place an undue burden on the Council, given the small number views received per year.

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.

7 August 2026