We've carried out a disproportionate burden assessment on Welsh-language content on our website.
Scope
Accessibility legislation states that public sector websites must publish content in an accessible format. This includes a criterion that the default human language of each web page can be programmatically determined.
Our website currently has the following pages in Welsh, but the language is identified in English in each of those cases.
Pages completely in Welsh
Pages with Welsh PDFs or links
There are pages across the website with links to Welsh-language PDFs that are linked to in Welsh. These PDFs are not tagged as Welsh language content.
Benefits of creating an accessible version
The benefits of indicating the language for each block of Welsh content would be:
- both assistive technologies and conventional user agents can render text more accurately when the language of the Web page is identified
- screen readers can load the correct pronunciation rules
- visual browsers can display characters and scripts correctly
- media players can show captions correctly
- as a result, users with disabilities will be better able to understand the content
Burden
We’ve considered different ways of adding Welsh language tags. We have estimated that:
- it would take two weeks of effort from our website supplier to add a language indicator to every content node – this would, however, not allow a mix of languages on one page, which would not fulfil our requirements
- it would take several weeks of effort from our website supplier to convert every custom content block to include a language option and we would have to make an assumption that all content within a block is one language – this solution would not cover every content type
- it would take several months of effort from our web team as well as our website supplier to analyse the nearly four hundred fields used around the website and turn a significant number of them into multi-form fields
- the additional burden of added regression testing each of the above solutions at every release would add two days per release
- it would take several months of effort from our website supplier to switch the entire website to be multi-lingual, as it was not designed this way originally
Other factors
In non-resourcing terms, the usability of the content management system would be diminished, with a degradation of the editorial experience for content creators.
This change affects one full page of Welsh content, which had 11 views over the last year.
Assessment
Having considered the estimated effort involved in adding Welsh-language tags to our content, along with the low amount of page views and downloads, we have concluded that the work involved would be a poor use of staff and supplier time. This represents a disproportionate burden on the organisation.