The impact of COVID-19 pandemic on increasing the digital accessibility of local government units

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic forced local government public services to move to the virtual world. Remote handling of matters in offices has become the rule rather than the exception. The 2016 EU Directive on public sector websites and mobile apps and the 2019 European Accessibility Act imposed an obligation to ensure that these services are provided electronically and accessible to people with disabilities. The aim of the authors’ study was to find out whether the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the implementation of European solutions in the Polish legal order and whether this implementation has resulted in the actual adaptation of the digital activities of local government units (LGUs) to the needs of people with disabilities. The research was conducted in Q4 2022 with two samples: 1. in the form of a questionnaire (approx. 250 LGUs) covered the fulfilment of formal requirements, the preparation of officials for the creation of digitally accessible documents and content, and the organisational preparedness of offices. 2. in the form of an analysis of the source code of the websites of 66 Polish cities with poviat rights – in view of the available results of the same sample from 2015. The conducted research indicated that local government units in Poland: 1. Met the formal and organisational requirements of digital accessibility, 2. did not make the necessary efforts to prepare employees to produce digitally accessible documents and content, and 3. the websites examined had lower quality source code in terms of meeting the WCAG standard in 2022 than in 2015. It seems reasonable to conclude that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a formal rather than a real impact on the digital accessibility of services provided by Polish LGUs.