CASE STUDY
Level Access Improves Product Adoption and Scales Customer Training with Accessible, User-friendly Thought Industries Learning Platform
Level Access upgraded from their open source LMS to Thought Industries, empowering them to deliver fully accessible learning to their diverse audience.
Level Access creates products that make digital properties (such as websites and mobile apps) accessible to people with disabilities. Their products focus on usability and inclusion, whether that’s making a website accessible to someone who uses a screen reader or optimizing an app for someone who needs hands-free access. Today, 26% of adults in the US have a disability, making it crucial that people with disabilities can access what they need to in an increasingly digital world.
Level Access’ previous open source LMS served a purpose at the time – it hosted courses and exams, and offered basic reporting. However, the platform wasn’t suitable for Level Access’ ambitious plans, and they decided to look for a more mature learning platform to deliver information and training to customers.
Having explored the learning platforms on the market, Level Access quickly identified that Thought Industries was the right LMS for their new Access Academy. Their number one priority was finding an intuitive, user-friendly platform that would make it clear what learners needed to do, and they also needed somewhere to house live, instructor-led events, as well as a way to streamline onboarding. Additionally, as an organization specializing in accessibility, their LMS needed to meet all of their own accessibility standards!
On the topic of accessibility, Level Access needed to make some additional tweaks to the Thought Industries platform to ensure it was compliant. Thought Industries opened up its global CSS to enable Level Access to make their own adjustments, such as adapting color contrasts, without needing to submit a support ticket, giving them the freedom to customize the LMS exactly as they wanted it.
With Thought Industries, Level Access creates learning journeys tailored to different roles. This enables Level Access to coach learners to be more self sufficient. It’s very expensive to retrofit accessibility, so Level Access’ learning ensures that designers, product managers, developers, and more have the knowledge and expertise to consider accessibility from the start of a project, saving them time and money and improving accessibility standards across the board.
Level Access also utilizes the Thought Industries multi-tenant solution, Panorama, to deliver branded training to different audiences. For instance, a user coming from their flagship accessibility management platform product will have a different branded experience than a user coming from their customer organization’s own LMS. Users can simply use single sign-on from their own company’s LMS to engage with content in Access Academy, for a seamless, uninterrupted experience.
Some of the key results Level Access has achieved in their first 6 months working with Thought Industries include:
- 60% increase in course completion certificates
- 100+ hours saved onboarding new customers
- 30% decrease in time spent on manual customer training
- Improved conversion rate from free trial to product demo to 6% (double the standard rate)
Megan Alfaro, Product Lead, Level Access
THE CHALLENGE
Level Access needed a new LMS to deliver vital accessibility training and certifications to a range of customers, while also ensuring that the LMS itself met all of its accessibility standards.
THE SOLUTION
Thought Industries worked with Level Access to build the new Access Academy, with customizations carried out directly by the Level Access team to ensure compliance with accessibility standards, and Panoramas for multi-tenant, branded access to the platform
The Challenge
Level Access were looking for a mature learning platform to keep up with their ambitious growth plans for delivering accessibility training to customer organizations. Along with being intuitive and easy to use, the new platform needed to tick all of Level Access’ boxes around accessibility. Users needed the ability to immediately pick up where they left off, know what learning they’d already completed, and what they needed to do next, without needing to search for it, for a more self-service, user-friendly experience.
Megan Alfaro, Product Lead, Level Access
Megan Alfaro, Product Lead, Level Access
The Solution
Thought Industries topped Level Access’ shortlist, and they quickly got to work on building a streamlined, user-friendly solution to support customer organizations seeking accessibility training. This spans use cases from 50,000-strong organizations wanting to change their company culture to consider disabilities, awareness, and etiquette, to designers looking to build accessibility into their wireframes. Moving existing customers and course completion history from the previous LMS to Thought Industries was “virtually painless” thanks to the bulk upload functionality, and it’s now significantly easier for Level Access to create and automatically schedule custom reports for customers, saving a lot of time for busy customer success managers.
Next up, Level Access wants to build a formal certification under the Level Access brand. Learners will be able to share their certificates on LinkedIn to boost brand awareness and encourage others to enroll. Additionally, they want to use the Access Academy for internal product enablement, and to further support their sales team, alongside ongoing updates to ever-changing accessibility information.