GSA Building AI Tool to Review Accessibility of Federal Solicitations

An office within the General Services Administration is building an artificial intelligence-based tool that could scan federal solicitations online to find those not accessible for people with disabilities, Federal News Network reported Friday.

GSA is working on the Solicitation Review Tool designed to ensure proposal requests from agencies are compliant with the accessibility standards under Section 508. Marina Fox, head of DotGov Domain Services at GSA’s Office of Governmentwide Policy, said the AI technology could review tens of thousands of RFPs on FedBizOpps.gov and other federal contracting sites. The office transfers data from SRT to a web portal where subject matter experts and agency users can see information about their files. 

Fox said GSA is preparing the tool for production using the cloud.gov platform. In previous tests, she noted the SRT has a 95 percent accurate prediction rate.

“The entire application is built using open source technology so we are scalable, agile and can always add more use cases,” Fox said. 

The agency plans to add a prediction and recommendation engine to the tool in the future to alert agencies about their Section 508 compliance before an RFP is issued online.