Quo Vadis, Digital Accessibility? A Prerequisite for Democratic Equality

Digital participation channels may widen access to public decision-making, but formal availability does not ensure substantively equal opportunities for political voice. This paper asks how accessibility conditions across a digital consultation journey may shape participation costs and what their potential implications are for political equality and procedural legitimacy. It conceptualizes digital accessibility as democratic infrastructure and integrates technical accessibility, journey analysis, socio-technical evaluation, and democratic interpretation. The analytical strategy distinguishes observed conditions, plausible participation risks, and demonstrated outcomes and traces a chain from observed condition to required resource, participation cost, recovery route, and potential democratic relevance. A bounded exploratory pilot applies the strategy to the publicly accessible, logged-out segment of ConsultaLEX, the Portuguese government portal for legislative and regulatory consultations. The pilot covers discovery, orientation, and authentication and assesses the availability of an entry point to expression and feedback. It identifies enabling conditions in programmatically named controls, structured consultation information, exact dates, and alternative authentication routes. Potentially constraining conditions involve relative deadlines, scripted navigation, registration and identity requirements, and human verification. Because no live commenting process was available, expression and feedback could not be inspected. The study therefore supports mechanism-level inferences rather than claims about participant exclusion or platform-wide conformance. These findings support treating accessibility as a necessary but insufficient condition for equal participation. The paper contributes a proof of concept connecting accessibility evidence to democratic analysis and identifies disability-led participant testing, live-process observation, and cross-platform comparison as priorities for future research.