Careway — Healthcare, Made Clearer

Making healthcare easier to understand, navigate, and access for everyone.

Inspiration

Healthcare can be difficult to navigate. Between complicated terminology, confusing forms, appointment instructions, insurance information, and digital healthcare systems, even simple tasks can become overwhelming.

These barriers can be especially challenging for people with disabilities or different accessibility needs. However, difficulty navigating healthcare is not limited to one group. Anyone can struggle to understand an unfamiliar medical term, follow a long appointment notice, or figure out what a form is asking.

I wanted to explore how technology and thoughtful design could make healthcare information easier to understand and healthcare experiences more accessible. This led to Careway: a tool designed around the idea that accessibility should be built into the experience from the beginning, rather than treated as an optional extra.

What It Does

Careway is an accessible healthcare navigation prototype that helps users understand information, prepare for appointments, and personalize their experience.

Some of its main features include:

• Reading Companion: Organizes long healthcare messages into smaller sections and highlights possible dates, times, costs, phone numbers, and action words.
• Document Reader: Allows users to upload text and Markdown documents, break them into readable sections, and listen to the content.
• Accessibility Settings: Offers adjustable text size, high contrast, dark mode, increased text spacing, a dyslexia-friendly font option, and reduced motion.
• Voice Assistant: Provides voice commands and spoken page content to make navigation easier.
• Healthcare Glossary: Explains common healthcare and insurance terminology in simpler language.
• Careway Navigator: Provides plain-language explanations and examples for confusing healthcare form fields.
• Access Passport: Applies saved accessibility preferences to the Careway experience.
• Barrier Scanner: Checks the page for several common accessibility markup issues.
• Appointment Question Builder: Helps users create questions to bring to an appointment.
• Appointment Checklist and Pack: Combines preparation tasks, questions, and access preferences into a printable summary.
• Language Support: Provides English and Spanish sample phrases and a bilingual appointment preparation sheet.

How I Built It

With the help of AI,

I built Careway as a web application using React and TypeScript. Vite provides the development and build environment, while CSS is used to create the responsive interface and accessibility-related styling.

I used Lucide React for interface icons and built several features around browser capabilities, including text-to-speech, speech recognition, local storage, and clipboard functionality.

The project is hosted through GitHub Pages, with GitHub Actions automatically building and deploying updates when changes are pushed to the repository.

The current prototype primarily runs in the user's browser. It does not require a separate application server, database, or connected generative AI service.

Challenges I Faced

One of the biggest challenges was designing accessibility features that could work together without making the application feel complicated. Different users may need different combinations of text, visual, movement, communication, or navigation adjustments.

Another challenge was making Careway useful to everyone rather than designing it exclusively around disability-specific features. I wanted users to be able to arrive with a simple problem, such as understanding a healthcare message, and find help without needing to identify themselves or disclose personal information.

I also had to consider privacy. Healthcare information can be sensitive, so I designed the prototype to avoid sending user-entered information to a healthcare provider or a Careway backend. The application uses browser storage for demo preferences and clearly communicates that users should not enter real medical or identifying information.

Finally, I had to work within the limitations of browser technology. Speech recognition support varies between browsers, and the current document reader supports text and Markdown files rather than PDFs or scanned documents. The language feature also provides prepared English and Spanish phrases rather than live translation.

What I Learned

Building Careway helped me understand that accessibility is not just about adding a few settings. It affects how an entire application is organized, how information is presented, how controls behave, and how users move through an experience.

I also learned how to combine multiple browser technologies into a cohesive application, build reusable interactive components, and deploy a project through GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages.

Most importantly, I learned that a useful accessibility tool does not have to make users feel different. It should simply make the experience work better for them.

What's Next

Some possible future improvements include:

• Expanding language support and translating more of the interface.
• Adding PDF and scanned-document reading capabilities.
• Improving compatibility with screen readers and assistive technologies.
• Exploring optional AI-powered explanations with clear consent and privacy safeguards.
• Developing a browser extension to help identify accessibility barriers on external healthcare websites.
• Testing the application with people who have different accessibility needs.

Important Note

Careway is an early-stage demonstration, not a medical service or patient portal. It does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment recommendations, and it does not connect to healthcare providers. Its language support is limited to prepared English and Spanish content, not live interpretation. Users should not enter real medical or identifying information into the prototype.

Built With

• github
• react
• typescript