Welcome to A2J Author® Social Justice Hackers! The A2J Suite is an open source no code platform and expert system that allows developers to quickly create friendly and accessible guided interview experiences. The most common uses of this software is to guide self represented litigants through the collection of data of forms such as those for expungements, orders of protection, and intake processes for legal aid triage. In the past 15 years, A2J Guided Interviews® have been run more than 6 million times to help low income pro se litigants fill out over 6.5 million court forms and it was an A2J Guided Interview® addressing ex-convict reentry that was the winner of the 2019 LITCon Hackathon with one team member going from complete novice to experienced author in a few hours.
What is an A2J Guided Interview®?
Basically you can turn this process of collecting data
into this process of collecting data:
while producing a form in the correct format
A2JAuthor is designed to allow developers to focus on content by minimizing the need to be concerned with programming language details and interface design. The A2J Viewer is accessible being WCAG 2.0 AA compliant and includes features to allow accessibility for screen readers. The interface is both mobile and desktop ready and includes friendly, customizable avatars that make it easier for interview runners to stay engaged with the content. A2J Guided Interviews also allow for just in time learning features (learn-mores and pop-ups) that empower developers to answer anticipated questions through graphics, text, audio, and/or video.
If you are just automating documents, A2JAuthor supports two different methods: importing pdf and placing fields with our easy interface or building a form from scratch using our easy WYSYWIG + logic text editor.
Guided Interviews that either only collect data or collect data and/or create documents can be published to our free hosting solution a2j.org. A2j.org handles user accounts and protects user privacy by encrypting answerfiles in transit and at rest with TLS and AES. Learn how to publish to a2j.org here
If you would like more complex postprocessing of data beyond generating a document, the viewer outputs data in easy to parse xml and json and can be processed on a custom backend through a POST to a customizable endpoint. This data can also be independently sent to the DAT, a separate project if needed to produce a document. This will require what is called a self-hosting setup. Instructions to set this up can be found at a2jauthor.org. Any programming language capable of receiving http requests and processing the requests is supportable.
A2JAuthor is flexible and modular to allow some customizability. The project is separated into 4 Open Source AGPL repos hosted at github under the ccali organization: the authoring system, a2jauthor; viewer, a2jviewer; DAT, a2jdat; and dependencies, a2jdeps.
"Helpful during this difficult time emotionally and financially."
Submitted March 18, 2016; Niagara County Surrogate's Court
Small Estate Program
"Very user friendly and worth using."
Submitted November 2, 2019; Suffolk County Family Court
Support Modification/Violation Petition Program
"Court forms can be very confusing and hard to fill out by yourself. Thank you for having this program to help."
Submitted on April 30, 2018; Yates County Family Court
Custody Modification Program
"All forms should have a DIY Form program option. It saves a lot of time and there are no errors. It also saves a second trip to the court."
Submitted May 13, 2015; Kings County Civil Court
NYC Minor Name Change Program
“the forms are easy to fill out I am so happy to have this information at my fingertips”
Submitted June 12, 2022;
NYS Supreme Uncontested Divorce
A2J Guided interviews are used all over the country and the world. Some of our national and international partners include: Law Help Interactive, Microsoft, Pew, Legal Services Corporation, New York Courts, Legal Aid Ontario, US Southern District Court of Missouri, Lone Star Legal Aid, Florida Courts, and Kentucky Courts
Tobias Nteireho will be onsite to provide assistance if needed.
[Example live A2J Guided Interviews projects]
KY Petition for Domestic Violence Protection 9/1/2022
KY Petition for Name Change 9-6-2022
KY Affidavit of Indigency and Request for Counsel 10/24/2022
LSLA COVID Eviction Interview v 2.0 ENG
[Have a run through of the winning project or view code, currently demo is limited to running guided interview]
2019 Suffolk LITCon Hackathon Winning project demo
2019 Suffolk LITCon Hackathon Winning project github repo
[Learn how to create A2J Guided Interviews]
How to Register to use A2J Author®
A2J Author® documentation for authors
[Hack our software]