EyeCare America
The EyeCare America home page has a friendly, yet authoritative, feel.
Site viewing options make the page accessible to a wide array of vision needs.
Information for each eye condition and disease is broken up into three key pieces: what it is, what you need to do, and why it's important.
EyeCare America continues to translate as much of the site as possible into Spanish.
Vision simulators help the recently diagnosed understand complex diseases, as well as an empathetic tool for friends and family members.
Easy on the Eyes
The general public seeks medical information on the Web, because it’s abundant, easy, and free. However, not all sources are sound. This creates a conundrum for doctors who want their patients to be knowledgeable and involved in their treatment, but not misinformed.
The Foundation of the American Academy of Ophthalmology turned to us for help providing a reliable, comprehensive source of online eye health information where member physicians can refer their patients with confidence.
The ophthalmologists we interviewed told us about the challenge of motivating people to monitor their eye health before a noticeable problem, and permanent vision loss, occurs.
The simulator requires the Flash plug-in.
We worked directly with some of these doctors to develop a series of eye disease simulators. These provide a strong impression of how vision loss progresses. (To see the effects of macular degeneration, just drag the slider above.)
Obviously, the Foundation cared deeply about making the site accessible to the widest possible audience. The new website offers type size, contrast, and layout controls for visual accessibility. We also restructured the content from their patient education materials to reflect the health literacy guidelines of the Ask Me 3 program of the Partnership for Clear Health Communication.
The well-crafted semantic markup supports screenreaders and general device independence. Knowing that their older audience prints a lot of material for reference and sharing, we created a custom print style, too.
The Foundation also oversees EyeCare America, a well-established public service program dedicated to reducing avoidable blindness by raising awareness about eye disease and facilitating access to medical care. After our initial discovery and research, we saw that the new educational resource was a good fit with service brand. So, we helped the organization align around an expanded definition of the service and education EyeCare America provides.
We evolved the historic EyeCare America logo and created a new online brand experience to connect the decades of past public service with the expanded vision for the future.