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Articulate brings company values to life with an accessibility focus
Accessibility is a natural extension of Articulate’s human-centered mission
Articulate is the world’s leading creator platform for workplace learning, delivering products that make it easy to create, distribute, and manage online training that delights learners everywhere. Organizations use Articulate products to support their people—to effectively build employee skills, quickly train new hires, and foster organizational agility in an increasingly remote world. As a human-centered organization, Articulate ensures people are at the forefront of everything they do; their mission stems from a passion to empower learners everywhere and of all abilities.
Both Articulate’s company culture and its suite of e-learning tools lend themselves well to accessibility. “Accessibility has become absolutely central to our organization. Creating training and helping people learn is a core function. It helps people improve themselves, get promotions, and be successful at work. So, it’s super important that it’s accessible because if it’s not, it can be a real barrier,” says Simon Taghioff, Product Manager at Articulate.
Realizing that they needed to better understand the current state of accessibility of their tools in order to meet customer expectations, Articulate partnered with Deque to conduct an accessibility audit on Storyline 360, one of their two award-winning authoring tools.
“The initial audit engagement with Deque gave us insight into what our accessibility issues really were, their impact, and severity. The audit helped us to not only understand but to prioritize our work moving forward.”
— Simon Taghioff Product Manager, Articulate
From technical compliance to exceptional experiences
The Articulate team understood they needed to make the tools accessible, but they also needed to maintain the tool’s inherent flexibility for the authors. With the results of their accessibility audit, Articulate prioritized accessibility fixes based on issue impact and severity on the most critical user paths.
As a result, the audit work with Deque helped Articulate shift from considering accessibility with a compliance mindset to something broader, more encompassing, and more inclusive. “The Deque audit really opened our minds and improved our understanding of accessibility. It was the first time we really understood just how much was needed and what we had to do,” Taghioff remarks. “It dispelled a lot of assumptions about how compliant we really were.”
Building strategic customer relationships through accessibility
Articulate took a unique approach to their accessibility journey that involved their customers from day one. The Articulate team set up a program for more than 100 customers to provide detailed feedback on accessibility changes in progress. Taghioff notes that this program was extremely effective in helping the Articulate team synthesize and understand which improvements were most important and that the solution they were proposing would really work for their customers.
Making accessibility improvements to their tools also helped Articulate emerge as a clear leader in the e-learning software industry. “We can really say we are pushing the envelope and are very proud of the work we’re doing,” says Taghioff. “Our customers see that and actively evangelize and advocate for our tools because they now know that they’re the right choice for accessibility.”
“It’s really helpful to have your customers help you to zero in and make sure the solutions you implement are flexible and will be well received in different environments.”
— Simon Taghioff Product Manager, Articulate
Live company values through accessibility
After the accessibility audit, Articulate transformed their fledgling accessibility practice into one more integrated into the organization and connected to being fully aligned with their values. “We’re seeing accessibility and its importance centrality spread through the organization. That aligns perfectly with our mission and values as a company,” Taghioff explains.
One of the biggest takeaways Taghioff and his team experienced was understanding that accessibility affects everybody. At Articulate, accessibility shifted from being a compliance concept to one about a universally applicable experience of inclusion. At its core, accessibility is a way to live and practice the organization’s core values in everyday work. “Accessibility is a way that we can live our values,” reflects Taghioff. “It’s tangible, it’s practical, it’s something we can do to make these aspirations real.”
“We’ve always been very focused on humans. It’s aligned with this notion of empowering people through education. The impact of making a difference in the world and the access to education through digital learning is transformative.
”— Simon Taghioff Product Manager, Articulate
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