Halton Children’s Aid Society
Accessible Design System for Child Welfare
Custom icons, hand-drawn illustrations, and an accessible WordPress rebuild for one of Ontario’s leading child welfare organisations — built for users in distress.
About Halton CAS
The Halton Children’s Aid Society supports children, youth, and families across the Halton region. In 2022, Cantan Group was engaged to build a new accessible WordPress website that could serve users in distress, centre the organisation’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion values, and handle a decade of legacy content.
The Challenge
Build for clarity, centre DEI values, and preserve ten years of SEO equity
Users in Distress
Visitors needed to find help immediately. Navigation had to be clean and discoverable, with a prominent call button available at every step.
Diverse Communities
Halton CAS serves clients from many backgrounds. DEI values needed to show up in design choices, icon work, and language access.
10+ Years of Content
A decade of pages, posts, and documents had to be migrated with redirects that preserved search rankings as an authoritative source.
Our Approach
Discovery with the team, hands-on design, and disciplined migration
Discover
We mapped goals with the Halton CAS team and drilled into the user experience required: a clean, easy-to-navigate site that surfaces the right information immediately.
Design
Brand colours, a custom icon system matched to the Halton CAS logo, clear fonts, and illustrated flourishes. The top banner went through multiple iterations to make emergency contact unmistakable.
Centre DEI
Illustrations commissioned for the One Vision One Voice program were featured across the site. The Diversity and Equity Committee was consulted on layout and icon design, and their input shaped the final direction.
Migrate
A full migration plan moved over ten years of data. Redirect rules preserved SEO page rank, and Google Translate was wired in for automated multi-lingual access across the site.
WCAG 2.1
AA compliance standard
10+
Years of content migrated
Multi-lingual
Automated language access
Related services: WordPress · Design · Accessibility & AODA
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Senior leadership on every engagement. Accessible design built in from the start.