Creating Up-to-Date Interactives from Flash files for NACCHO

In 2010 and 2011, Interactive Knowledge designed an online curriculum titled The Roots of Health Inequity for our clients at NACCHO (National Association for County and City Health Organizations). This courseware has been used consistently since it launched and has been accessed by over 100,000 public health professionals and university students. The Roots of Health Inequity includes six units of content, references, and interactive activities and takes several hours to complete. Most of the units have at least one complex interactive activity that looks closely at an important issue in health equity such as government decisions that lead to the degradation of low-income communities’ health outcomes. These interactive activities were created using Adobe Flash when the course was being built. However, Flash is no longer supported and as of January 1, 2021, Flash files could not be displayed on Google Chrome and all other popular browsers.

We have been replacing the Flash-based files contained in the Roots of Health Inequity over the past few months and will complete the conversion process before the end of July 2021. We have successfully replicated the design and content in most cases and whenever it was impossible to duplicate the original files, we redesigned and improved the user experience while maintaining the content and purpose of the activity. Finding all of the original assets was a bit of a challenge but with the help of the client and one of our freelance designers (thanks Bart Marable) we were able to locate everything needed. Two interactive activities that were released as identical versions of the Flash files (now replaced with HTML 5) include The Anatomy of an Un-Natural Disaster (Hurricane Katrina) and Polluting Sites in Northern Manhattan. We hope to redesign the entire course in the near future to make it mobile-friendly and more accessible. But until then, the important content that was originally delivered via Flash will still be available to students and professionals currently completing this online curriculum.