Welcome to parachute.ca, the reorganized, accessible website (under our new, shorter domain name) for Parachute, Canada’s national charity dedicated to injury prevention.
Mobile-friendly and built for our users
The new Parachute.ca website is mobile-friendly and built to serve our two primary audiences:
- Members of the public such as parents, families, teachers, coaches, or anyone who wants to undertake activities, set up a home, travel our roads and learn how to do all those things in ways that minimizes incidents of injury
- Injury-prevention professionals who want the latest, most detailed information about the field.
Better organized
We’ve simplified how our information is organized. You can look up a wide range of injury topics and check out the programs we run. Health-care practitioners and others who work in injury profession can access our professional resources, including three in-depth collection of resources on the topics of Concussion, Seniors Falls, and Vision Zero.
We have also incorporated several previously separate websites into the new site, including Horizon (whose injury-prevention information is now integrated into the various injury topics here), and the former Vision Zero site, which now lives as a collection of resources.
Of course, as a charity we do none of this alone – so we also highlight our “Donate” section and, under the “hamburger menu” (the two-vertical-line menu prompt at right of the main navigation bar), you can find out more About us, our Partners and Donors and how we provide information and insight for the media.
Emphasis on search
To make it simple to get to the information you want quickly and effectively, our search features are greatly improved and more easily accessed. You can even use alternative terms and synonyms for topics, and the search engine will try to locate the appropriate information for you.
En français
You can now toggle easily between EN (English) and the FR (French) version of the same page, so that seeing the equivalent content in both languages is much easier. However, we’re not fully there yet: while the English side of the website is completed, we are still in process of creating the French mirror site, doing fresh, up-to-date translations page by page. We will continue developing these pages and making accessible French resources over the next year. We thank our francophone users for their patience as we complete all the translation and updating.
Accessible features
As well, our site is now following accessibility standards as set out in the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. No more difficult hovering with your mouse or trackpad to reveal long lists. All our English-language PDFs have been remediated so they can be read by a screen reader; the French remediation of resources is underway. All our images have alternative text tags that describe the image for someone using a screen reader.
The web team
Parachute’s VP, Communications & Marketing, Kelley Teahen, led the project, along with Michael Gemar, Manager, Technology & Creative Services. Special thanks to design and developer partners, Premise Design Communications of Toronto, who were stellar and patient with helping us sort out the overgrown jungle of our old site and creating a well-tended, easy-to-navigate garden, built in WordPress, in its place.
Additional thanks go to two talented, dedicated co-op education students from the University of Waterloo, Alice Lau and Hannah Hill, who we dubbed our “Waterloo Wunderkinder”. They handled most of the migration, updating and accessibility remediations for our masses of content.