Digital public service avoidance by people with disabilities

Abstract

An increasing number of public services is delivered primarily via digital channels, however, a pressing problem is that they are frequently avoided or even rejected by marginalized citizens, such as people with disabilities. In this paper, we develop a contextualized framework of digital public service avoidance by people with disabilities that builds on and extends prior information systems research by incorporating complexity as the main antecedent of avoidance but it also leverages findings from social psychology and sociology by incorporating the need for human interaction and stigma consciousness as unique sociocultural barriers. We apply the framework to the context of a digital public service specifically developed for people with disabilities and assess its utility in a quantitative study of 145 severely disabled citizens. Our results uncover the need for interaction as a novel and underexplored driver of avoidance, illustrating that the missing “human touch” may be a hidden barrier to bringing more marginalized citizens online.