Guidance for the electronic submission of documents for planning applications
These guidelines relate to planning applications submitted to the Council. Adherence to these guidelines will help the Council to quickly publish applications on its website and also help to ensure that planning application content continues to be accessible
The guidelines for planning applications are as follows:
All planning material should be clearly named, with names that are specific to the planning application. A description of plan 1, plan 2, plan 3 would not be acceptable
All submitted documents will need to be clearly viewable on a 17" screen at a resolution that is not greater than 1024 x 768
All planning application documents should be submitted electronically in Portable Document Format- (PDF). Documents not submitted in PDF format will require conversion, which may delay their publication on the website
The PDF size should be kept to a minimum, without adversely affecting quality. To this end, it would be preferable if the text within the PDFs was created from the original electronic documents rather than from scanned documents
No single PDF is to exceed 5 MB. Where the limit is exceeded, the file should be spilt into multiple files that comply with this guideline, or compresses so that it does not exceed this limit
To improve accessibility, documents should include titles, chapters and headings, as they make it easier for the technologies such as screen readers to understand the logical reading order of the content without any ambiguity
Efforts should be made to include written descriptions of images in documents. For example the Tags Palette in Adobe Acrobat can be used to add description of an image (Alternative Text). When a screen reader encounters that image in the document, it will read the alternative text description so the user can understand what the image is about.
Further information on how to create accessible PDF files can be found on the Adobe website
Scanned documents should have Optical Character Recognition- OCR applied to them to produce searchable textual content which can be interpreted by technologies such as screen readers
All PDF documents should included navigational and organisation aids, such as a table of contents, bookmarks and useful headings. This should provide an easy way for users to move through the document so that they do not have to read the entire document page by page in order to find what they are looking for
All electronic documents that have security applied (i.e. passwords) to prevent copying or editing, will need to be accompanied by an alternative electronic version adhering to all the above, so that it can be published directly onto the Council's website
Furthermore if the alternative itself has security applied, then content access will need to be enabled for the visually impaired / accessibility.
Further information on facilitating this can be found on the Adobe website