Procurement Strategy 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 Procurement Strategy document 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

Given the high number of charts and tables within the document and the length of them (17 pages in total), we estimate that it would take approximately 3 working days to make the PDF fully accessible and this would not be a good use of resources.

The document is static and not regularly updated, meaning the investment in accessibility improvements would not benefit a frequently used or evolving resource.

Also relevant to this decision are that:

• The document is legally required to be published
• Interest in the document is low - it is primarily viewed by potential suppliers rather than residents of Oxford
• Requests for additionally accessible versions are rare - there have been no requests from suppliers requesting an accessible version of the previous Procurement Strategy 2023 to 2025 document since the strategy was approved in 2023
• The document does meet accessibility requirements for a large number of users, although some groups may find it disproportionately difficult
• We can help to provide accessible versions of any content within the document which is not clear on request

Based on our assessment, it is considered that changing the whole document to a more accessible format would be a disproportionate burden and not a good use of resources.

There is an urgent need to published the document as soon as possible so we have taken the decision to publish in its current format.

Mitigations are in place to help provide accessible versions of specific content if requested in the future.

2 September 2026