Disproportionate burden assessment - website and intranet

• Date: 18 January 2022
• Latest revision: 31 March 2022

Scope

As of September 2018, accessibility legislation states that public sector websites, including intranets and extranets, must publish content in an accessible format. Older intranets need to be made accessible when they are updated.

The extranets for staff and students are all public and part of the University website. From January 2020 they are in the process of migrating into a more accessible intranet platform.

Benefits of creating an accessible version

All staff and students will be able to use an accessible intranet and access content in an accessible format.

Burden

We’ve estimated that to review and migrate to a new intranet system will take a dedicated team of 15 people 18 months to complete.

Subject matter experts from each area of the extranets would also be required to engage with the project to review content and seek approval. Based on the previous build and migration of the public website, we estimate this requires 95 hours per site over a 12 week period. There are 169 of sites which equates to 16,055 hours. 

A realistic timeframe for delivery of a project of this magnitude would be a minimum of 18 months.

Other factors

The University commenced a project in January 2018 to build a new, more accessible website and to review and migrate the content to this new website platform. The first phase of this project completed in December 2020. It took a team of approximately 15 people 24 months to complete. 

This team then moved onto the next phase of the project to build a new Staff hub and Student hub (intranets) based on the more accessible public website platform infrastructure. The estimated delivery date is 30 October 2022, revised from August 2022.

Due to the nature the content plays in signposting to and providing information and services to staff and current students, we took the decision to keep the pages published until they are migrated to the new, more accessible platform. We are doing this iteratively allowing us to migrate priority areas first.

Assessment

Due to the scale of the work; the need for staff from all areas of the organisation to review its content; and experience from a previous web migration project delivering an accessible website it is not feasible to make the intranet WCAG 2.1 AA compliant before August 31 2022 and doing so would be a disproportionate burden.

The project to migrate to a Staff and Student hub is in progress and due to complete at the revised date of 30 October 2022.