Disproportionate burden assessment

We always aim to make content on this website accessible.  However, we have assessed that ensuring every document published on our website meets the accessibility legislation would be a disproportionate burden.

We know some PDF, Excel, and Word documents are not fully accessible and that it is likely that documents uploaded in the future in this format will likely not be fully accessible.

If you need information from this website in a different format, please email yhs-tr.communications.team@nhs.net

Scope

Our assessment looks at PDF, Excel, and Word documents that are not essential to the provision of our services and patient care.  This includes, but may not be limited to, our annual report and accounts, public board papers, as well as some policies, procedures, strategies, plans, and reports.  These files do not consistently meet accessibility standards such as:

• Non-text content
• Info and relationships
• Meaningful sequence
• Contrast (minimum)
• Page titles
• Focus order
• Headings and labels.

We continue to make incremental improvements to the accessibility of any new versions of these documents.  This includes delivering training to teams across our Trust, creating accessible templates, and running automated accessibility checks.

However, we cannot guarantee full accessibility at this time.  This is in part due to the format of financial data and performance reports, as well as the complexities of some of the information.

Sharing accessible information is important to us and we are committed to making all documents relating to patient care and the provision of our services accessible, as HTML web pages and, where necessary, as accessible documents.  We will always prioritise the accessibility of information and documents that are essential to providing patient care.

Most of the information on our website is fully accessible already.

Benefits

The benefits of making these documents into accessible HTML web pages are:

• Information would be accessible to everyone.
• Information would be easier to search and index.

Burden

Our assessment of the burden of making these documents into accessible HTML web pages is that:

• There are thousands of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files published on our website.
• Each document would need to be reviewed for accessibility.
• Our web provider tells us that there are currently 4,061 live PDFs across the site which, working with an average timeframe of five minutes per document, would take around 338 hours to fix. If we commissioned our web provider to do this work, it would cost in the region of £25,000, a cost which is prohibitive given the budget constraints we are working within.
• Some documents, such as our board papers, are compiled by multiple people shortly before they are legally required to be available to the public.
• Many of the documents are part of our legislative duty as an NHS foundation trust, e.g. annual reports, and publishing a new version may require detailed checking, a formal sign-off process, and submitting a new official version.
• Many of the documents contain complex elements which are difficult to retrospectively convert, such as detailed tables, graphs, and diagrams.

Other factors

• Our focus is to ensure that any new documents, relating to patient care and essential to the delivery of our services, are accessible and meet the needs of patients, carers, and people living in our communities.
• Interest in the documents within the scope of this assessment is low.
• We have and will always provide people with accessible versions of these documents on request.

Assessment

We believe converting documents, where there is little evidence of demand, would represent a disproportionate burden on our Trust because of the staff time it would take and the associated costs.