Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust is committed to improving your experience of this website and providing access to as many visitors as possible.
Our website features a broad range of clinical information and we have limited resources to manage it alongside our other digital communication channels. For this reason, some historical PDFs and documents published on our website some are not fully accessible, for example missing text alternatives and missing document structure. Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish on our website after 21 March 2024 (with the exception of board papers) will meet accessibility standards. We are committed to using our resources to remove and update this content over time and in our Accessibility Statement we offer clear points of contact for visitors having difficulty using our website or to request information in different formats, such as accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille.
Our organisation’s web resources
Leeds Teaching Hospitals has a small amount of dedicated Web Development and Content resource. We have one full-time Website Manager, two Assistant Web Developers and one Digital Content Officer.
The team has a wide variety of tasks and projects to deliver. They are responsible for managing the Trust’s intranet, newsletter and web analytics systems, supporting all internal and external web-related questions and requests, and managing the creation of online forms.
We have assessed the costs and resource implications of ensuring all historical documents on our website are immediately accessible and we believe that this would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations.
Benefits of creating fully accessible historical documents
All visitors to the website would be able to view the full content of all historical documents on the website.
Burden
The website features over 700 historical documents, which have been produced by different colleagues across the Trust. Ensuring each document is fully accessible would involve contacting the owner of each document to redesign it. This would involve considerable time and resource. We believe our limited resources will provide more value for our website visitors by focusing on assuring and maintaining the quality and accessibility of new information we upload to our website after 21 March 2024.
Assessment
As resolving this issue would involve considerable time and resource for a small team with significant existing responsibilities, we have decided it is a disproportionate burden to complete this work immediately.
Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish on our website after 21 March 2024 (with the exception of board papers) will meet accessibility standards. We are committed to using our resources to remove and update this historical content over time and in our Accessibility Statement we offer clear points of contact for visitors having difficulty using our website or to request information in different formats, such as accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille.
We are unable to make our board papers accessible. Board papers are uploaded to the website as PDF documents numbering hundreds of pages. These pages contain scanned images and large reports sourced from multiple authors and services. They are compiled and uploaded just before they are legally required to be publicly available and any delay due to making them accessible would risk a fine or a cancelled public meeting.
The cost of converting these documents is significant and is not financially justifiable. If you would like to request this information in an accessible format, please contact our Trust Board & Membership Administrator.