Scope
This assessment relates to PDF documents no longer in active use only. We are fully committed to making all active documentation fully accessible, as HTML web pages and other appropriate file types, and hope to have completed this process by the end of 2024.
We have prioritised the documents which get the highest amount of use on our site, and most information on our site is accessible already.
Benefits
The benefits of making these PDFs into accessible HTML formats would be:
- The documents would be fully accessible to all users
- The documents would be more easily searchable and indexable
Burden
Our assessment of the burden of making these PDFs into accessible HTML formats is that:
- there are thousands of documents created by the organisation
- each document would require a number of hours of work to be recreated into a fully accessible HTML page (we estimate, based from experience from converting documents, each document could take anywhere between 2 to 30 hours to complete. This is dependant on the length and complexity of the documents and requiring relevant work to be signed-off where required)
- many of the documents are officially published (e.g. Official or National Statistics) and publishing a new version requires detailed checking, a formal sign-off process, and submitting a new official version to the national statistician
- many documents contain complex elements such as tables and graphs which are difficult to convert
Other factors
Also relevant to this decision are that:
- Interest in the proposed documents is low with few people accessing them
- Of the documents we are proposed documents, requests for additional accessible versions are rare
- We will and do assist with accessible versions on request
Assessment
Where documents are no longer updated or in active use, there is a high cost in terms of employee hours to convert them to an accessible format. Interest in these documents is limited, but we will always respond to requests for different formats for our publications on a case-by-case basis so that accessible versions are available where requested.
We consider that the costs of converting older documents where there is little demand would be a poor use of limited staff time, and would represent a disproportionate burden on the organisation in terms of cost.