Yahoo Sports' documentary short features All Blind Fantasy League
[Video description for our blind and visually impaired audience: As this film begins, 10 people who are blind or visually impaired gather in an airy kitchen to participate in a Yahoo Fantasy Football league draft. Team managers sit around a kitchen table decked-out with a spread of refreshments. They listen with earbuds to the screen readers on their laptops and smartphones.
The group includes eight men and two women. One of the men, Nick, wears a hefty gem-encrusted ring on his pinky finger.
Throughout the film, footage from the gathering is interspersed with interviews with individual fantasy team managers, who speak in front of bright, colorful backdrops.
The film concludes with each team manager facing the camera and announcing the name of their fantasy squad.]
Yahoo Fantasy Sports are built to be enjoyed by everyone.
Yahoo Sports is proud to announce the debut of a short documentary produced by Yahoo about its All Blind Fantasy League (ABFL) — a group of sports fanatics who use assistive technology like screen readers with the Yahoo Fantasy app to connect with their passion for fantasy in a fully accessible way.
The short documentary captures the engaging stories of the blind and visually impaired fantasy managers of the league, and it shares their enthusiastic enjoyment of a game millions of people love, but which was not always accessible to people with vision loss.
Brian Fischler, the commissioner of the ABFL and a successful stand-up comedian, lost his sight as a young adult. He shares how Yahoo Fantasy changed his life: “As my vision deteriorated and I needed assistive technology, there weren’t many companies offering accessible solutions. I started working with Yahoo to test and give feedback on their features. Yahoo is one of the only companies to offer a fully accessible season-long fantasy football platform — it’s hard to find other companies quite as advanced.”
Along with introducing us to all the ABFL members — including the trash-talking reigning champion, Nick D'Ambrosio — the mini-doc also gives a glimpse into what it’s like on draft day, highlighting the league's picking process, biggest rivalries, and taunting nicknames.
Yahoo Fantasy’s native app has been designed and developed using significant input from blind users, with enhanced screen reader support, logical layout, and ease of use. It also provides options for high contrast, customizable font sizes, and other accessibility features, developed with and tested by blind Fantasy players.
Yahoo Fantasy’s built-in accessibility is just one example of a myriad of ways the company makes its content and applications accessible to all users. Earlier this year, Yahoo committed to closed captioning 100 percent of original and partners’ English-language videos available across all of its platforms and sites, for its nearly 900 million users.
Yahoo Fantasy’s mission is to be the No. 1 fantasy app for all users who have a passion for fantasy sports.
Yahoo, which is the third-largest internet property per ComScore, also donated $5M to disability advocacy organizations earlier this year to further the company’s commitment to being an inclusive leader in the global effort to make all media and technology accessible.
You can share the documentary directly from this YouTube link.
