Adams County Health Department

Context

Adams County launched an independent health department following the separation from Tri-County. As part of that transition, the legacy website inherited outdated content, fragmented ownership across departments, and a heavy reliance on PDFs for public information.

Pages had no clear ownership or structure and were mixed with legacy content that was no longer relevant. Many resources important to the new health department existed only as PDFs. Some of this content also contained language flagged by federal compliance requirements, with a hard compliance deadline approaching and no remediation plan in place.

[insert image of old site]

Responsibility

I was brought in to assess the full scope of the problem and build a process for addressing it. There was no existing roadmap, so my role involved defining what needed to happen, in what order, and working with leadership to document what was needed from each program and division. My responsibilities included auditing, remediation, establishing accessibility and content standards, and advising internal stakeholders throughout the rebuild.

Method

I began with a full site audit of the legacy website, creating a report covering more than 250 pages to identify structural issues, orphaned content, and flagged language requiring removal. From there, I worked with leadership and met with each program and division to determine what content was essential, what could be removed, and what needed to move from PDF into standardized web pages.

I then coordinated content handoff to the external development agency, organizing body copy, component assignments, PDF inventories, and redirect lists. In parallel, I remediated hundreds of PDFs in CommonLook, completing the majority before the new site launched. After launch, I conducted a full accessibility audit of the new site and identified critical issues including broken skip navigation, keyboard traps in the main menu, and structural heading errors. I delivered a structured findings report to the development team.

Impact

The site launched with a more consistent, standardized content structure, helping move the department away from a PDF-first model toward accessible HTML content. Hundreds of documents were remediated to meet accessibility standards prior to launch, with ongoing remediation continuing afterwards. The post-launch audit also surfaced critical keyboard and navigation issues that had gone undetected despite the vendor reporting high Lighthouse accessibility scores.

[insert image of new site]

Reflection

This project reinforced that sustainable accessibility requires clear ownership and consistent content governance. Many of the most significant issues stemmed from publishing process gaps, while others were not visible through automated tools alone.