What is the Disproportionate Burden Exception?
Section 3(2) of the Danish Web Accessibility Act allows public authorities and public law bodies to refrain from meeting specific accessibility requirements if compliance would constitute a disproportionate burden. A disproportionate burden means measures that would impose an unreasonable organisational or financial burden on the authority.
It is important to be clear about what the exception does not cover: it is not a general exemption from the Web Accessibility Act, and it never applies to an entire website. It can only be applied to specific, delimited content — and only after a concrete assessment that the authority itself is responsible for carrying out and documenting.
The Danish Agency for Digital Government can verify at supervision whether the criteria for an exception are met. Because the assessment is the authority’s own, it also bears full responsibility for ensuring it is correct and well-documented.
The Criteria That Must Be Weighed
The Act specifies precisely which factors must be considered. The authority must take into account its own size, resources, and nature — a small institution with limited finances and a remit only partially directed at the general public has more latitude than a larger state body with a central public-facing role.
The costs of making content accessible must also be weighed against the benefits for citizens with disabilities — taking into account how frequently and for how long the content is used. Traffic data is directly applicable here: a document with very low traffic and limited relevance to citizens with disabilities may potentially be exempted, while core content with broad use cannot.
The following circumstances may support a legitimate exemption:
- Very low visitor numbers documented with traffic data, combined with limited relevance for people with disabilities
- Disproportionately high conversion costs — for example, complex scanned historical documents where OCR processing and manual correction are resource-intensive
- The organisation’s limited size and resources, making it unreasonable to require full accessibility of older archive material
The following circumstances argue against exemption:
- The content is the only means of accessing particular information or a service
- The content is directed at a group that can reasonably be expected to include citizens with disabilities
- Accessibility of comparable content has already been achieved elsewhere on the website
- Technical solutions exist at reasonable cost — such as PDF-to-HTML conversion
Typical Examples from Public Accessibility Statements
A review of actual accessibility statements shows that the exception is most commonly applied to three types of content in practice:
Video recordings with low viewership — particularly council meetings and committee proceedings published as a legal requirement, with limited visitor numbers and limited demand for subtitled versions.
Large and complex PDF documents — substantial reports, budget materials, or technical appendices that are highly resource-intensive to make fully accessible. The Danish Health Data Authority explicitly cites “very long and complexly structured” documents and “scans of very old original documents” as content that may fall under the exception.
Excel and PowerPoint files — particularly data extracts and presentations requiring manual tagging to become accessible, and which primarily address a specialist audience.
The Requirement for an Accessible Alternative
A central obligation follows from section 3(3) of the Act: if the disproportionate burden exception is applied, the authority must indicate in the accessibility statement whether it has been possible to provide an accessible alternative.
In practice, this means it is not sufficient to conclude that converting a document is too costly — the authority must actively consider whether the content can be made available in another way. Hjørring Municipality provides a good example: in its accessibility statement, it states that non-accessible documents are offered as a read-aloud service or accessibility-optimised version on request via the National Digital Helpline.
The accessible alternative does not need to be in exactly the same format as the original — but it must give citizens access to the same information.
PDF Archives: Exemption or Conversion?
PDF documents are the area where the exception is most frequently invoked — and also where it is most commonly misunderstood. Many authorities have archives containing hundreds or thousands of PDF documents and are tempted to exempt them wholesale as a disproportionate burden.
This is legally problematic. The exception requires a concrete, individual assessment per content type — not a blanket exemption covering an entire document archive. Documents published after 23 September 2018 that are actively used in public service provision cannot generally be exempted.
It is worth considering whether conversion to HTML is actually as resource-intensive as assumed. Existing PDF documents can today be converted to WCAG 2.1 AA-compatible HTML directly in the browser via PDFAccess — without server upload, without licensing costs, and without technical expertise. This changes the resource calculation for many authorities and can make it harder to justify exempting entirely ordinary documents.
Documentation and Ongoing Assessment
The assessment of disproportionate burden is not a one-off exercise. The Agency for Digital Government advises that exempted content must be assessed on an ongoing basis — because the relevant criteria can change over time. Visitor numbers shift. Technological capabilities improve. And the resource burden of accessibility decreases as new tools make conversion easier and cheaper.
In practical terms, this means that an exemption that was justified in 2021 may not be justified in 2026. Authorities should, at the annual review of the accessibility statement, examine whether the conditions that underpinned the exemption continue to hold.
What Cannot Be Exempted
To give a clear picture, it is useful to specify what the exception can never cover:
- The entire website or mobile application — only specific, delimited content
- New functionality and new content published going forward, which should be designed to be accessible from the outset
- Core public-facing content that is not offered in an accessible alternative
- Content where accessibility can be achieved at a reasonable cost using available technology
- Content exempted purely for organisational convenience — the exception requires a genuine burden, not merely a matter of prioritisation
The disproportionate burden exception is a lawful instrument — but a narrow one. Used correctly and documented properly, it gives authorities genuine room to manage complex accessibility tasks. Used as an easy way out, it risks placing an authority in a difficult position at supervision.