Disproportionate Burden Assessment

The scope of this assessment covers a total of 978 PDF and Microsoft Office documents created and uploaded to our website. 

We are committed to either removing these documents from our website completely or converting them into fully accessible HTML web pages. We hope to have completed this process as soon as possible. 

To help us with this process, we will be looking at analytics and prioritising the documents which are accessed the most frequently. 

We are not required to fix documents published before 23 September 2018 date if they are not essential to providing our services. 

There are several benefits of either removing or converting these documents: 

• The documents would be fully accessible to all our website users 
• The documents would be easier to search 
• Outdated documents would be removed, reducing clutter and potential confusion 

Our assessment of the burden of either removing or converting these documents is: 

• Our yearly budget for the website is £1968. This covers web hosting, security certificates and software. We also estimate to apply around £1000 of admin time towards content creation and management although this is not quantified. 
• There are 978 documents created by Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust and published on our website.
• Each document would require a significant number of hours of work to be put into a fully accessible format, depending on complexity and length.
• Many of the documents have multiple authors and significant ratification processes.
• Many of the documents contain complex tables, graphics, charts, diagrams and embedded multimedia.
• Very few people access these documents, particularly the older ones. Reports show these are accessed approximately 1-2 times per month.
• Requests for accessible versions will always be met on an ad hoc basis if required.
• The estimated cost of converting these documents into an accessible HTML format is £39,376. 
• We estimate that the burden will end at the point where older versions of documents are succeeded by newer, more accessible versions. 

There are 978 documents to be converted. We estimated each document would take an average of 2.5 hours to convert, with some taking less time and some taking more time. This totals 2445 working hours. 

The average hourly rate for an employee with the ability to amend is £16.60.

Hours x Rate = £39,376.

In the case of the many documents which are infrequently accessed, the number of employee hours required to convert them into an accessible HTML format would be very high. Additionally, ad hoc requests for accessible versions of documents will always be met. 

We consider there is a significant disproportionate burden on the organisation in terms of cost, as it relates to employee hours, particularly where there is no evidence of these documents being accessed regularly. 

Assessment Date: 21st May 2025