That is an excellent analogy.
I didn't just say free however, I also said "Universal"
A government provided service that failed to provide for deaf people because they are deaf would likley fall foul of various anti-discrimination laws.
As I said, Is owning a mobile phone/having an internet account now a legal requirement?
The State can not claim to be providing a "Free" (Or "Universal") service to help people to meet their legal requirements if it isnt actually doing so because some people do not happen to have optional (And paid for) gadgets in their lives.
As for the idea that "People should just be better organised"
This actually strikes home particularly in my case.
Some people just arnt, and there is little that they can do about it in practice.
In particular, there are more people than you might realise who are functionally illiterate.(Even, and in particular, a lot of otherwise very smart people. The whole point about "Dyslexia" is that you have a subset of people who do
very well indeed at the non-verbal aspects of IQ tests and other tests of objective intelligence but nevertheless do rather dismally at the verbal aspects of such tests)
Again, If you have the top 5% or so of smart educated and highly literate people creating systems that the entire rest of the population are just handed and expected to cope with. One shouldn't be too surprised when a significant minority fail to do so.
To my mind, one of the most important functions in a modern state should be to try to make legal compliance by citizens as easy and simple as possible.
Unfortunately, they typically heap complexity on top of complexity. And then it doesn't work properly anyway!
(See my other thread on how I seem unable to SORN a New-Old car because the DVLA system, despite having issued me a new V5 in my name, doesn't recognize that I am the new owner! (And WTF is the point of SORN anyway? It is just another useless layer of totally unnecessary paperwork to burden peoples lives who already have to endure far too much!
))
Grumble-Grumble!