Brussels: Europe and the Arabs
82.3% of people with severe disabilities in the European Union used the internet in the past 12 months, according to figures from 2024 published by Eurostat, the European Statistical Office in Brussels.
The figure reached 89% among people with moderate disabilities, and 95.2% among people without disabilities. This means that the gap between people with severe disabilities and those without disabilities reached 12.9 percentage points.
Regarding some online activities, half of people with severe disabilities (50.9%) used the internet to search for health information. For people with moderate disabilities, 59.1% searched for health information, slightly more than for people without disabilities (58.4%).
While 51% of people with severe disabilities used the internet for online banking, this was the case for 59.6% of people with moderate disabilities. For people without disabilities, the figure reached 69.3%. At the same time, less than a quarter (19.5%) of people with severe disabilities used the internet for educational activities, while the percentages were much higher for people with moderate disabilities and people without disabilities, at 27.1% and 35.8%, respectively. While more than half of people with severe disabilities also used the internet for phone or video calls (55.6%), this was the case for nearly two-thirds of people with moderate disabilities (64.7%) and three-quarters of people without disabilities (75.3%).