Auditory displays for accessible fantasy sports

Abstract

In this paper we address the lack of accessibility in fantasy sports for visually impaired users and discuss the accessible fantasy sports system that we have designed using auditory displays. Fantasy sports are a fun and social activity requiring users to make decisions about their fantasy teams, which use real athletes' weekly performance to gain points and compete against other users' fantasy teams. Fantasy players manage their teams by making informed decisions using statistics about real sports related data. These statistics are usually presented online in a spreadsheet layout, however online fantasy sports are usually inaccessible to screen readers due to the use of Flash on most sites. Our current system, described in this paper, utilizes auditory display techniques such as auditory alerts, earcons, spearcons, general text-to-speech, and auditory graphs to present sports statistics to visually impaired fantasy users. The current version of our system was designed based on feedback from current fantasy sports users during a series of think-aloud walkthroughs.