Host Rasmus Cloes spoke with Dr. Irmhild Rogalla, head of the Institute for Digital Inclusion at Bremen University of Applied Sciences, on the Digital Public Health Podcast about solutions for an accessible digital world. According to her, both developers and policymakers must share responsibility for making this happen.
For Irmhild, digital inclusion means that everyone truly has access to digital life — regardless of any limitations. It’s not just about websites, but especially about software, applications, and systems that need to be designed with accessibility in mind right from the start.
During the conversation, it becomes clear that while open-source software offers great potential for more digital sovereignty, it often performs particularly poorly when it comes to accessibility. Volunteer developer communities usually lack both the resources and the necessary knowledge to implement true digital inclusion. Many people with disabilities are forced to rely on improvised solutions just to use digital tools at all. But these workarounds are error-prone, quickly become outdated, and ultimately result in only an illusion of true participation. Irmhild sharply criticizes this situation.
Although there are legal requirements for accessibility in Germany, they often remain weak in practice or are not enforced. Without binding standards and strong public awareness, accessibility tends to be treated as a "nice to have" rather than something self-evident.
Irmhild emphasizes that real inclusion can only succeed when people with and without disabilities meet and work together. Only through personal exchange does an understanding arise of how urgently accessibility is needed and why it must be considered from the very beginning.
