Digital accessibility and the test panel
IDA is a trial setup for building your own Inclusive Digital Assistant.
In recent weeks we celebrated IDA being certified as digitally accessible. IDA is possibly the first certified chatbot in the Netherlands. A fine milestone for Gem, which can now start implementing it. And in future, others will be able to use IDA too.
Certification, human work and implementation
IDA was presented for the first time at the Gem Kwartaalupdate on 16 April. Certification took several steps: a self-scan, submission for an independent assessment, and processing the findings. There were challenges along the way.
When zooming in, it was sometimes hard to keep conversations properly visible. And when users scrolled, questions and answers would sometimes disappear from view. These and other points for improvement have since been resolved.
From certificate to human work: now that IDA is certified the foundation has been laid, but we are carrying on. We are gathering feedback from users with a disability. The test panel starts next week.
From human work to implementation: IDA's code is available via GitHub. Initially it is available to the Gem community, for implementation at municipalities. That will take a little more time yet.