Screening for all
Client
MCD Global Health
Year
2026
Work
PDF remediation, accessibility design, layout design, project management
Deliverables
Suite of PDF resources
Over 65 million U.S. adults live with a disability—meaning one in four patients has a disability, whether disclosed or not.
Screening For All is an initiative funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to address the significant barriers people with disabilities face in accessing preventive health screenings. The project provides healthcare practitioners and patients with evidence-based resources to make preventive health screenings accessible to all.
The Screening for All resources include multiple PDFs with checklists and condition-specific information for patients to prepare for their screenings. I redesigned a suite of PDFs within MCD’s brand and brought them into accessibility compliance standards to ensure users with disabilities can utilize them.
Case Study
The MCD team designed the 15 original PDFs in Canva. While Canva is a user-friendly tool for single-page flyers or documents, it does not offer sufficient features for multipage layouts or accessible PDFs.
I was tasked with:
Redesigning the documents with improved medical content based on real feedback from users with disabilities, and
Ensuring the final digital PDFs met WCAG and PDF/UA standards.
I knew at the start of this project all content would need to be brought into Adobe InDesign, the industry standard for multipage desktop publishing. Aside from being my strongest suit, it would have the technical features needed for PDF/UA compliance.
As I brought the existing content into 15 InDesign documents, the content itself evolved substantially throughout production. The MCD team was tasked with collecting feedback on the original PDFs from research groups comprised of actual users with disabilities. This valuable, real-world feedback resulted in 600+ comments which the client assessed and incorporated into our revision process. The volume of work increased, yet our deadline could not be shifted due to grant requirements.
To deliver, I worked very closely with my two MCD contacts for needed structural and content edits, along with a blind test user utilizing a screen reader to ensure the true accessibility of our deliverables. For me, this was the most valuable experience in the project—not just checking the PDF/UA and WCAG checkboxes, but also making sure the content made sense from a usability perspective.
When it came time for PDF remediation, I used Adobe Acrobat Pro’s internal accessibility check as my preliminary test for any basic errors. But in order to meet full PDF/UA and WCAG standards, more comprehensive tests are required. I utilized PAC, Axes4, and PDF4WCAG to locate specific file errors, and remediated within the native InDesign file or the exported PDF, as needed.
