Accessibility starts long before the technology

Put AI on your website and the first question is a fair one: can everyone work with it? We think so, and that takes more than a tidy widget. Think of a menu four levels deep. A filter you have to understand first. A page where the answer sits somewhere halfway down. That is where visitors get stuck. vragen.ai clears those barriers away: the visitor says what they want to know, instead of having to find the route to it.

Accessibility affects more people than you'd think

Accessibility can sound like a box to tick for a small group. The figures point the other way.

• 3 million people in the Netherlands struggle with reading, writing and/or arithmetic. Source: Stichting Lezen & Schrijven (Dutch)
• 17% of 16- to 75-year-olds had no basic digital skills in 2023. Source: Statistics Netherlands (Dutch)
• 300,000+ people in the Netherlands have a visual impairment. Source: Oogfonds (Dutch)

Since 28 June 2025 it is also written into law. The European Accessibility Act obliges many commercial and partly publicly funded organizations to make their websites, apps and digital services accessible. The standard for that is WCAG, level AA. Small companies are exempt.

Anyone who struggles with reading, is less digitally skilled or has an impairment gets stuck first at exactly the points where you have to search, click and scan.

What changes when you let the question in

Here is what that looks like when someone asks about opening hours:

What time does the front desk close?

Answer from your own content

The front desk is open on weekdays from 9:00 to 17:00.

Source: Opening hours

Opening hours

Weekdays: 9:00 to 17:00

You ask your question in your own words

Navigating menus, filters and long pages is the hardest part for a lot of people. You have to keep track of where you are and click in exactly the right places. With vragen.ai you simply type what you want to know. No more searching and scanning.

You don't have to guess the site's wording

vragen.ai looks at what your question means. Ask about "papers for a new passport" while the site says "required documents", and the answer still comes out. For the three million people who struggle with reading and writing, that makes an enormous difference.

You only get answers from your own content

vragen.ai may only answer with what is genuinely on your website. If it isn't there, it says so. So everyone gets the same answer from the same source. No fluent text that sounds right without resting on anything.

You can always check it yourself

Under every answer it says where it came from. Click through and you jump straight to the passage it rests on, in full context on your own site. A warning that an answer might be wrong doesn't help anyone. The source does: you open it and read it back. That matters most for people who aren't used to looking things up.

You set the tone and the reading level

You decide how an answer sounds and at what reading level it is written. A municipality aiming at plain language gets answers in plain language. That way the wording fits whoever is reading.

Also when someone doesn't speak Dutch

If someone doesn't speak Dutch, they ask their question in their own language and get an answer in it too. Your content stays Dutch, and the door is open anyway.

And then the widget itself

A good idea helps nobody if the thing on your page can't be operated. And that is where it often goes wrong. Digimonitor assessed 39 municipal chatbots against 29 accessibility benchmarks. Not one passed. We didn't want to be among them, so accessibility was a requirement from the start. The standard vragen.ai integration meets WCAG 2.1 level AA, which for government bodies is also the legally required level.

Just a dialog, the kind every browser knows

The answer appears in a plain HTML dialog, a proven element every browser and assistive technology understands on its own. Anyone working with a screen reader hears immediately that something new is there, because the focus moves to it by itself. Anyone not using a mouse closes it with Escape. The widget runs inline in your page and leaves the visitor's own tools and settings alone.

What the WCAG test produced

We held the standard widget against the WCAG guidelines and adjusted it on several points. Elements that only responded to hover now work with the keyboard too, with a visible focus. Buttons such as copy and regenerate got a clear text label. While the answer appears, ARIA live regions report the status to screen readers, so you aren't left waiting in silence. And we built the heading structure up more logically. The details are in our article about the WCAG updates.

If you want to dig into the guidelines themselves, SWIS explains them in WCAG: the digital accessibility guidelines explained (in Dutch).

The WCAG guidelines sum accessibility up in four principles. Here is how the standard widget lines up with them:

• 1

  Perceivable

  Sufficient color contrast, text alternatives and status messages that screen readers read out through ARIA live regions.

• 2

  Operable

  Fully operable with the keyboard, with a visible focus and closing through Escape.

• 3

  Understandable

  Answers in the tone and at the reading level you set, always with the source included.

• 4

  Robust

  A standard HTML dialog, so browsers and assistive technology can handle it on their own.

Good content is still half the work

vragen.ai only answers from your own content and always points back to the source. If that source holds unclear text, your visitor gets an unclear answer. The European Accessibility Act asks for exactly the same thing: clearly written information. So good content works both ways, giving better answers and a more accessible site.

And you see right away where it pinches. Every question that comes in shows what visitors really want to know and where your content falls short. So you don't have to guess which page needs attention. Read how vragen.ai works.

And the door is open

Your content stays as it is. All that is added is a door, and it is open to more people: to those who struggle with reading, those who don't use a mouse, those who don't know the Dutch term.

Want to know more about how we handle accessibility and security? That is on the security page, or feel free to get in touch.