Accessibility of Public Sector Institutions for People with Special Needs in Polish Regions

Abstract

Social inclusion is one of the important conditions for sustainable socio-economic development. However, one of the paths leading to social inclusion is to ensure a high level of accessibility of institutions for people with special needs. The study described in the present paper examined the accessibility of Polish public sector bodies based on data from government reports (comprehensive study). Accessibility is a feature that should be offered as a complementary service offered to both individuals and legal entities during epidemic emergencies and beyond. The limited accessibility of public institutions is a significant obstacle to the full well-being of the population. Indicating differences in the spatial dispersion of this phenomenon in Poland was the basis for undertaking research for this article. Three areas of accessibility were tested: physical (architectural) accessibility, digital (web) accessibility, and ICT accessibility. A synthetic measure of accessibility was constructed for the study and used to rank Polish voivodeships (provinces, NUTS 2) from highest to lowest. Clustering was used to identify similar regions. The highest- and lowest-scoring regions were the Mazowieckie voivodeship (capital city—Warsaw) and the Podkarpackie voivodeship (capital city—Rzeszów), respectively. Legal accessibility requirements are the biggest driver of further accessibility improvements for voivodeships.

Analysis of the digital accessibility of selected Polish government portals for people with disabilities

“…Some improvements were found in case of e-government websites redesigned from EU funds. Research by M. Janusz et al from 2023 [20] included analysis of data from the "Status report on providing accessibility to people with special needs" prepared by the Ministry of Development Funds and Regional Policy. This research shows that accessibility is highly variable among regions in Poland: The highest is in the Mazowieckie voivodeship, the lowest is in the Podkarpackie voivodeship.…”