GPES Data for Pandemic Planning and Research – Data Protection Impact Assessment PDF - disproportionate burden assessment

As of September 2018, accessibility legislation states that public sector websites must publish content in an accessible format. 

The GPES Data for Pandemic Planning and Research (COVID-19) Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) has been published on our website as a 105-page PDF.  

The benefits of creating an HTML version of this PDF would be:

• a fully accessible version for all users to access
• an easily searchable and indexable version

We’ve estimated that it would take around 2 weeks of a content designer’s time to create an HTML version of this PDF.

Due to the nature of this content, there was a need to publish the document quickly, so we took the decision to publish the PDF as a temporary measure. An HTML page was created specifically to host this PDF, and this page was given the same title as the publication, making it searchable for users.

Our intention was to convert this document to an accessible HTML web page.

This page was published on 3 December 2020. As of 3 March 2021, analytics show that the page has been viewed 112 times, with only 26 downloads of the PDF document. These figures indicate that interest in this publication is low.

Having considered the estimated effort involved in creating an HTML version, along with the low amount of page views and downloads, we have concluded that the work involved would be a poor use of staff time. This represents a disproportionate burden on the organisation.