Our site contains many PDFs that have been created from our printed marketing material. Many of these documents have lots of pages and we do not create an accessible version of each document as this would be a disproportionate burden.
Scope
This assessment relates to print-based marketing documents that are uploaded to the www.solent.ac.uk website. These documents contain marketing information that is readily available on the website in an accessible HTML format. These marketing documents are uploaded each year and historic documents remain publicly available through direct links, although they are not linked to from around the website.
Benefits
The benefits of making these PDFs into accessible formats would be:
- An alternative accessible PDF version of the website information available to all users.
Burden
Our assessment of the burden of making these PDFs accessible is:
- These documents generally have many pages and are designed to be distributed in print formats. As they are designed for print, the documents are not directly accessible in a digital format.
- To create each document in an accessible format would be a duplication of effort as the content is already available in HTML format across the website.
- The internal design team that creates these marketing documents consists of two designers and the resource is not available to make accessible versions of the marketing PDFs.
- We estimate each document would take weeks of effort to make into an accessible version.
Other factors
Also relevant to this decision:
- These documents are predominantly distributed as physical documents.
- There are HTML based versions of all information in these documents.
- The team that creates these documents is small and does not have the resource to create multiple versions of the same document.
Assessment
Our assessment has concluded that these documents contain information that is readily available on the website in accessible formats. We also respond to requests for our publications in different formats on a case-by-case basis, so accessible versions are available on demand.
As such, we consider that the costs of converting marketing documents into accessible versions would be a poor use of limited staff resources and would represent a disproportionate burden on the organisation in terms of cost.
We expect this disproportionate burden to be required for marketing documents indefinitely.
