It's the difference between building a product to spec and building a product so it's usable by the actual demographic that needs to use it. US Digital Service talked about finding these Flash barriers and building quick webform replacements making a HUGE improvement in usability (like from ~5% completion to 90%+ completion IIRC).

I wouldn't be surprised if those same government departments are stuck on WinXP SP2 with IE6-8 with Flash enabled. IT at huge orgs moves extremely slowly.