Case Study: Practising Law Institute

In 2017, Practising Law Institute (PLI) was aware of the importance of accessible digital content, but, like many organizations, was not quite sure how to reach the accessibility goals they had set for themselves.

As internal advocates researched the topic, they began to grasp the full magnitude of what they were trying to accomplish and realized their in-house resources were not fully prepared to take on this initiative. Instead, they turned to TPGi to help them ensure their digital content would be (and would remain) accessible to everyone.

Two primary drivers motivated PLI to focus on accessibility. First, they recognized the importance of having an accessible website that all their customers could use to consume their products. As a cutting-edge learning organization, many of their products are available online or in a digital format. Everything from webcasts to digital versions of all PLI publications to exam prep all needed to be accessible, or PLI risked presenting a poor experience for customers, potential litigation, and damage to their brand.

External advocates were the second motivating factor. These individuals notified PLI of areas where they needed to make accessibility improvements and reinforced the internal consensus about accessibility, strengthening the case for buy-in across the organization.

Once PLI decided to move forward, they conducted extensive research on how to create an accessible website, train their staff to create accessible content, and monitor their accessibility over time. They quickly realized that their aspirations were beyond what their internal resources could provide and that working with a capable partner was the best way to start addressing the problem.

PLI chose to partner with TPGi to achieve its accessibility goals. Over their three-year partnership, TPGi was able to deliver the following:

• • Development accessibility training for PLI’s Software Engineering and Product Management teams
  • Multiple comprehensive manual accessibility reviews for PLI’s website and digital content
  • Several VPAT iterations
  • Expert helpdesk support to enable PLI developers to resolve difficult accessibility challenges
  • Accessibility monitoring and testing via TPGi’s ARC Monitoring service and free Chrome plugin, ARC Toolkit, to proactively identify issues

PLI can see the tremendous progress they’ve made (and, more critically, managed to maintain) in reducing the number of WCAG violations per page by looking at their testing data in ARC Monitoring.

They managed to reduce their WCAG failures by over 90% since starting their partnership with TPGi.

PLI’s site went from being riddled with inaccessible content to one that provides an accessible user experience for their customers. Their dev team now feels more confident about resolving accessibility issues that crop up, and is better educated on how to write code to avoid those errors from occurring in the first place.

Prior to working with TPGi, they had a problem that they did not understand, nor did they know what steps to take to resolve it. After partnering with TPGi for over three years, PLI now feels confident they’ve accomplished their accessibility goals and are well prepared to tackle future accessibility concerns, thanks to the tools, training, and internal processes they’ve implemented.