Version 1
: Received: 31 July 2023 / Approved: 1 August 2023 / Online: 2 August 2023 (10:06:21 CEST)
How to cite:
Nowak, P.A.; Zajdel, K.; Jęcek, M.; Salachna, T. The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Increasing the Digital Accessibility of Local Government Units. Preprints2023, 2023080146. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202308.0146.v1
Nowak, P.A.; Zajdel, K.; Jęcek, M.; Salachna, T. The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Increasing the Digital Accessibility of Local Government Units. Preprints 2023, 2023080146. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202308.0146.v1
Nowak, P.A.; Zajdel, K.; Jęcek, M.; Salachna, T. The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Increasing the Digital Accessibility of Local Government Units. Preprints2023, 2023080146. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202308.0146.v1
APA Style
Nowak, P.A., Zajdel, K., Jęcek, M., & Salachna, T. (2023). The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Increasing the Digital Accessibility of Local Government Units. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202308.0146.v1
Chicago/Turabian Style
Nowak, P.A., Mariusz Jęcek and Tomasz Salachna. 2023 "The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Increasing the Digital Accessibility of Local Government Units" Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202308.0146.v1
Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic has forced the transfer of local government public ser-vices to the virtual world. Remote handling of matters in government offices has be-come the norm rather than the exception. The 2016 EU directive on public sector web-sites and mobile applications and the 2019 European Digital Accessibility Act made it mandatory that these services be provided electronically and accessible to people with disabilities. The purpose of the study conducted by the authors was to determine whether the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in the implementation of European solutions in the Polish legal order and whether this implementation resulted in the actual adap-tation of digital activities of local government units (LGUs) to the needs of people with disabilities. The research was conducted in Q4 2022 in two trial formats: 1. In the form of a survey (about 250 LGUs), which covered compliance with for-mal requirements, the level of readiness of the officials to create digitally accessible documents and content, and organizational readiness of the offices. 2. In the form of an analysis of the source code of the websites of 66 Polish cities with county rights - due to the availability of results of the same sample from 2015. The completed research showed that the LGUs in Poland: 1. met the formal and organizational requirements for digital accessibility, 2. did not make the necessary efforts to prepare employees to create digitally ac-cessible documents and content, 3. the surveyed websites had inferior source code in terms of meeting the WCAG standard in 2022 than in 2015. It seems reasonable to conclude that the Covid-19 pandemic had a formal, rather than real, impact on the digital accessibility of services provided by Polish LGUs.
Keywords
information society; digital accessibility of administration; electronic public services
Subject
Business, Economics and Management, Business and Management
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
