Designing Public Services for Everyone

The effectiveness of public services depends on their benefits reaching the envisaged users. However, access to public services is unequally offered to distinct beneficiaries, with disparities and barriers in both physical and digital environments hindering the inclusion of users, compromising the exercise of rights, and contributing to the non-take-up of services and other inefficiencies. European Union (EU) Member States and EU candidate countries and potential candidates have been exploring and adopting approaches to address these challenges.

This text draws on the exchanges during the SIGMA webinar Design for all: inclusion and accessibility in public services, which took place on 22 May 2026, to address challenges across the EU candidate countries and potential candidates in the Western Balkan and EU Eastern Neighbourhood regions. This was the first webinar in a series that SIGMA is organising on Delivering value in public services throughout 2026 and 2027.

On the "accessibility of administrative services", SIGMA monitoring reports of Western Balkan administrations highlight that, even accounting for multichannel access and wide territorial coverage, administrative services remain difficult to access for diverse segments of users (p.43). The existence of strategic instruments is not always followed with concrete actions and clear responsibilities for their implementation (p.47). Government websites are not widely aligned with accessibility requirements either (p.47). The Eastern Neighbourhood administrations also show challenges with the definition of policy objectives and establishment of institutional set-up in this area due to the inconsistency of implementation.^[1]

From the exchanges during the webinar, this text highlights six drivers to promote accessibility and inclusion in public services, associated with useful and usable resources.

Inclusion and accessibility are not optional add-ons for public services stay. These principles are in line with the core values of the EU and are articulated through legal instruments such as the European Accessibility Act. Inmaculada Placencia Porrero (Senior Expert – Disability, European Commission, DG JUST) emphasised the importance of setting legislation to implement this strategic direction, ensuring its translation to concrete measures. The Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2021-2030 focuses precisely on implementation to further enhance access for persons with disabilities on equal basis with others, in particular by ensuring accessibility complemented by human-centric and user-friendly digital public services across Europe. 

Astrid Podsiadlowski (Head of Sector, EU Fundamental Rights Agency) stressed the importance of bringing the appropriate mandate and sponsorship behind the implementation of legislation and strategies based on human rights. The EU Fundamental Rights Agency is an independent body for promoting and protecting human rights across the EU, as enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. The Agency wants to provide decision makers with robust evidence; strengthen dialogue and co-operation among fundamental‑rights actors; and support governments with advice.

The importance of ensuring clear co-ordination of organisations across government (and, more generally, the ecosystem) is also pivotal to ensure that legislation and strategies translate into effective actions. The OECD Recommendation on Human-Centred Public Administrative Services recognises that the governance, design and delivery of services is a shared responsibility across branches and levels of government, also considering that public services, as critical touchpoints with government, can contribute to trust in government. Whole-of-government strategic approaches together with the inscription of procedural guarantees and administrative and judicial review in the design and delivery of services, states the Recommendation, are needed to promote accessible and inclusive services, while ensuring transparency, efficiency, reliability, accountability, openness, integrity and fairness in their conception, management, and evaluation.

Public services cannot model their options on the supposed features of a “lambda citizen”, i.e. the idealised user whose profile does not stand out in any way. Against this potentially misleading idea of an “average user”, service design has been highlighting the importance of bringing to the centre of its approaches the behaviours, needs and expectations of the concrete users of each service, with all their diversity, changeability over time, and sensitivity to contexts and channels. Diluting their opinions and perceptions in generic measures or indicators can leave aside important indications about the fairness and equality of public services. For instance, the 2024 OECD Drivers of Trust report shows that the percentage of respondents that  consider civil servants will treat them fairly when they apply for a benefit or service is 15 percentage points lower among people who describe themselves as being a member of a group that is discriminated against than among those who do not identify as belonging to such a group (p.31).

Particularly relevant in the context of accessibility and inclusion of public services is the involvement of “persons with lived experience” (PWLE) to design, assess, and improve policies and services.  Ana Ortega (Innovation Head of Innovation, ONCE) presented ONCE Innova, an innovation laboratory that acts as collaborative and multidisciplinary space for the promotion of inclusive innovation and cultural transformation. Among others, ONCE Innova runs a community that engages with blind persons, key beneficiaries of its initiatives, to conceive projects, develop activities, and test potential solutions. Since 2019, ONCE Innova has gathered 439 project proposals from these beneficiaries. 

Public administrations are invited to step up their capacities and equip public servants with skills and resources to address these challenges and opportunities to build inclusive and accessible services. Jesús Hernández (Director of Innovation at Fundación ONCE & AccessibleEU Programme Lead) shared the goals and results achieved in the AccessibleEU (financed by the European Commission), one of the flagship initiatives proposed by the European Commission Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2021-2030 (see above). This initiative is dedicated to support the implementation of  EU accessibility legislation across its Member States, working actively to create environments, products, and services that are usable by persons with disabilities. The programme collaborates widely with public and private stakeholders to provide training in accessibility, promote best practices, support policy development, and drive systemic change towards accessibility.

Governments are opening the floor for ecosystem partners to collaborate in the design, development, implementation, and scaling-up of potential solutions for public services.^[2] Ukraine’s Diia, the digital ecosystem created by the Ministry of Digital Transformation that provides more than 250 online services to citizens and business, chose this ecosystem-based approach as its default option. Illia Rodin (Head of Software Engineering, Diia Mobile team) emphasised that the Diia platform, currently with 2 million users per day, is providing public services in collaboration with an ecosystem of partner services. The creation of the service licence agreements (SLA) was instrumental to describe the rules by which partner services must operate to be part of this ecosystem. This set of guidelines, electronic artifacts, and support tools enable an effective onboarding process for partner services. Diia then established a team of specialists that assesses, monitors, and reviews the quality, integrity and accessibility of the partner services, submitting these services to code reviews, visual design reviews, flow reviews, and accessibility reviews, in addition to providing consultation and collaborative support. The quality and reliability of the whole system are key drivers for the engagement of partners.

There are many ways to lift up the existing stakeholders and build a community out of their converging interests on inclusion and accessibility. In Spain, ONCE is committed to build a collaborative and forward-looking innovation ecosystem, as Jorge Iñiguez (Secretary General, ONCE) mentions. The goal is to work alongside public institutions, companies, and other social actors also to extend the impact beyond the organisation. Among others, ONCE Innova (see above) promotes an inclusive innovation ecosystem together with start-ups, large companies, universities, technology centres and makers, to share knowledge to innovate with a focus on people. The programme launches calls inviting start-up entrepreneurs to target selected accessibility challenges, organises bootcamps to enable joint work with inclusion experts, and provides support for potential solutions to be piloted. Since its creation, 221 proposals to improve inclusion have been submitted by start-ups.

Technological requirements and solutions should not be the alpha and omega of public services. Diia (see above) can easily and constantly access government services, is built on the notion that public services are not just developed for users, but also with users at their centre. Bozhena Denysenko (UI/UX Design Lead) and Andrii Kostenko (Digital Accessibility Specialist) provided an in-depth exploration of the technical requirements and options involved in the production of effective digital solutions together with users. Diia adopted four key principles for its products: (1) human-centred design, including the option to build services around life-events and use user feedback to ensure continuous improvements; (2) transparency, clarity and predictability, including communication about data sources or reduction of cognitive loads for users, emerge as drivers of trust for users; (3) design simple surfaces and seamless interactions for users, while placing technical complexity “under the hood ”, i.e. the visible surfaces and touchpoints that users press, see or interact with; and (4) prevent the digitalisation of burdens and bureaucratic procedures, meaning simplifying processes and procedures (e.g. reduction of number of steps) before going digital.

Despite the promises of technologies to promote, accelerate, and mainstream accessible and inclusive public services, there are also risks associated with the adoption of digital solutions. Astrid Podsiadlowski highlighted the barriers the digitalisation of public services may present to the equal enjoyment of fundamental and social rights for older persons and other vulnerable groups. Digital divides start with the barriers to infrastructure and devices (e.g. affordability of equipment); may be heightened with the uneven distribution of internet use and digital skills; and the prevention or exclusion of user engagement, for instance with the assumption of stereotypes about older people (e.g. incapable, adverse, or unwilling to engage with ICT). Throughout the EU, there are relevant experiences that have been adopted, such as Slovenia distributing “senior tablets” to people older than 70 or Italy’s Digital Republic, which grants all users access to a “digital academy” where they have access to educational materials.

At the centre of this discussion remains the notion that inclusion and accessibility in public services goes beyond the operational level of their design and delivery. Giulio Venneri (Deputy Head of Unit, European Commission, DG ENEST) highlighted the suite of consequences inclusiveness and accessibility in public services has across technical, legal, and political dimensions.

The 2024 OECD Drivers of Trust shows that responsive and fair public services can improve citizens’ satisfaction.^[3] The same report highlights that the largest trust gaps in government are associated with individuals' sense of having a say in government actions, which is a key driver of trust (69% of those who feel they have a say in government actions trust national government, while only 22% do among those who feel they do not have a say). This study indicates that, beyond the operational gains, giving citizens an active role in making decisions about services’ and ensuring that people are treated equally there, among others, can improve trust in government (p.144).

As noted above, accessibility and inclusion are built upon core values of the EU and align with its commitments to democratic governance. While still an open question, promoting more accessible and more inclusive public services also appears to help generate or renew the social contract uniting governments and users.

This text is an original contribution that, building on the contributions shared during the webinar, pinpoints actionable insights. It does not attempt to replace the speakers’ points of view or provide an exhaustive representation of their inputs. The text is the sole responsibility of its authors.