The public sector offers a wide range of services for individual citizens and businesses. In Germany, this service structure is particularly complex due to the federal division between the national-, state- and local levels. An unfortunately often overlooked aspect of service delivery is the accessibility of services for impaired citizens. At the end of 2019, 7.902.690 severely disabled people lived in Germany, making almost 10% of the overall population (Statistisches Bundesamt, Statistik der schwerbehinderten Menschen - Kurzbericht 2019). Even though all citizens should be equally able to make use of all public services by law, complete accessibility seems to be a utopian state as there are various challenges that impaired citizens still face when attempting to use public services, such as physical barriers (e.g. stairs), the lack of interpreters for deaf people, the absence of documents in braille, etc.  

Digital technologies can bridge the existing shortcomings of the services that the public administration offers. For example, computer vision, real-time data processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence can support public officials when providing services to impaired clients. However, supporting public officials is only one side of the story. Especially those technologies directed to minorities such as deaf or blind citizens must lay a crucial focus on the establishment of design requirements and design principles to ensure that applications are developed according to these groups' needs. 

Therefore, this thesis aims to develop a set of design requirements / design principles of a (still to be defined) application being used in the public sector context, mitigating the challenges that impaired citizens face. This topic will probably involve qualitative research approaches such as interviewing, so German language proficiency would be beneficial. However, if you are interested in the topic but prefer a more international or literature-based approach, please do not hesitate to get in touch. The exact scope of the thesis is to be more closely discussed in collaboration with the supervisor. 

If you are interested in working on a topic to create a more inclusive society, we are looking forward to hearing from you.