No one can deny that there is plenty of information for general public to plan their day and visit restaurants, museums and go to work , however accessibility information for people living with disabilities is still extremely limited. Websites like Yelp and similar reduce the concept of "accessibility" to a binary selection (Wheelchair accessible or not). Unfortunately this doesn't help the majority of people stranded at home with different disabilities. For example, visually or hearing impaired does not get any help from the current categories. Many people are left having to call or email and that can be discouraging and a way to block them from integrating into society. We believe that technology, in this case AI applied to an assistant, have the potential to make life better for a lot of people.

Accessibility-Check bot have 2 main functions, the first one is to organize a coordinated crowdsourcing effort to map restaurant, store , offices, etc. It basically shoot a quick set of questions like "Do you see a ramp?", "Can you ask for a Braile menu?" , "Is the bathroom in the first floor?", etc. All these questions are based on American’s with Disability Act (ADA) and Open travel alliance (OTA).

The second functionality of this bot is to inform the general public about the accessibility based on their location. A mechanism will be included to catch unanswered queries, save them in a database and add them to the crowdsource queue.

Confirm you have NodeJs 10.x or higher

Node-v

Install the code dependencies

yarn install

Enable .env file

mv .sample.env .env

Add App IDs and Secrets to .env configuration

more info at: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/introduction

vim .env

Things to update:

PAGE_ID=
APP_ID=
PAGE_ACCESS_TOKEN=
APP_SECRET=
VERIFY_TOKEN=<ANY STRING YOU'LL REMEMBER>

In order to receive messages, we need to be able to get incoming webhooks from Facebook Servers. So we need an external address, a quick way to do this is to use NGROK since it will provide an external https address that will tunnel into your NodeJS running app.

1- Install NGROK in your computer, go to the link and follow the instructions:

https://dashboard.ngrok.com/get-started/setup

2- run in port 80

./ngrok http 80

Inside the .env config, add the URL provided by NGROK:

APP_URL=https://<AUTOGENERATED>.ngrok.io

⚠️ You need to update APP_URL everytime you close the terminal running NGROK.

node app.js

http://localhost:80/

You should be able to see a welcome Message.

Pay attention to the Command Line, it will provide you with an URL that you need to visit in order to validate the token. it looks similar to this:

https://xxxxxxxx.ngrok.io/profile?mode=all&verify_token=xxxxxxx

Go to the link provided by the Terminal, it looks similar to this:

https://m.me/xxxxxx

Send a message to your Page from Facebook or in Messenger, if your webhook receives an event, you have fully set up your app! Voilà!

⚠️ If you see the Bot, but you cannot communicate with it, most probably you haven't been added as contributor (this bot is not public yet), Please send a mail via Slack or mail: gcid12@gmail.com