Inspiration
iDelve was created in response to the "Jobs for Citizens with Disabilities" challenge in HACC 2016, where Mary Brogan and Jessica Worster of the Hawaii Department of Health presented a need for tools to help people with disabilities gain meaningful employment, develop and maintain a career, and promote awareness of the value and abilities of people with disabilities to combat the cultural misunderstandings.
What it does
iDelve is a consumer-based tool for the job seeker and their support team to use during the career planning and discovery process.
- Promotes self-awareness, self-confidence, and self-growth
- Collects skills tracking information
- Provides a multimedia resume that shows rather than tells about the job seeker's capabilities
How we built it
Our designer, Ariana Stugard, created mock ups that we presented to various potential users throughout the disabilities community, including the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation and the Development Disabilities Division. This allowed us to get excellent feedback.
We took the feedback and implemented this prototype using Ruby on Rails with a PostgreSQL backend. We used HTML5 and Bootstrap to create a website that is targeted towards iPhones and iPads, which were identified as common tools.
We are hosting the demo on Heroku at https://idelve.herokuapp.com/ (username: [email protected] / password: test1234).
Challenges we ran into
There is a huge variety of different situations when discussing disabilities and what people with disabilities are capable of. There are a lot of passionate people within the social work community with conflicting views of how people with disabilities need to be treated. It is difficult to narrow down what specific type of user this app needs to be tailored to, so we had to decide to aim for a type of simplicity and accessibility that makes the app usable by as many people as possible, while not being "over-simplified".
We also needed to consider what information is covered by HIPAA and what is not.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to have some great interactions with the State regarding this topic and are hopeful that we can keep working this project at some level.
What we learned
True diversity is difficult but worthwhile.
What's next for iDelve
- Finish this hackathon.
- Continue to talk with the Department of Health and other interested parties to see if there are ways this application can benefit the disabilities community.
- Implement requested features including:
- Add details to personality traits and skills.
- Single-click capture (photo, video, text)
- Add more ways for users of the app to communicate with each other.
- Provide a way to plug in training modules.
- Plan out integration methods with the future State case management system.
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