NEW YORK—Fantasy football is not for everyone, of course, but thanks to an effort by Yahoo the popular group game for avid football fans is available to people with vision loss and/or issues with their sight. The Internet company recently highlighted the efforts it has made to enable vision-impaired fans to take part in fantasy football with its short documentary, “The All Blind Fantasy League.”
 
The documentary provides background on 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 and participate in the ABFL. The league is now in its sixth season.
 

Players gather around the table for the ABFL fantasy draft.
“Playing fantasy sports is my way to connect to the games I grew up loving,” one of the players notes as the documentary begins. “The fact that this league exists and allows us to all do it together just gives us a great feeling. You know everyone always underestimates blind folks,” adds ABFL player David Goldstein.

 
Brian Fischler, commissioner of the ABFL, is a stand-up comedian when he's not playing fantasy football. 
The Yahoo Fantasy native app has been “designed and developed using significant input from blind users, with enhanced screen reader support, logical layout, and ease of use,” the company noted. The app also provides options for high contrast, customizable font sizes, and other accessibility features, developed with and tested by blind Fantasy players.

“As my vision deteriorated and I needed assistive technology, there weren’t many companies offering accessible solutions,” Brian Fischler, the commissioner of the ABFL and a successful stand-up comedian. (Fischler lost his sight as a young adult.)

“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,” Fischler added.


 Nick D'Ambrosio is the ABFL's reigning champion and leading trash-talker.
The Yahoo documentary film—which can be viewed here—introduces the members of the ABFL league, including “the trash-talking reigning champion, Nick D'Ambrosio,” Yahoo notes. The setting of the film is the group’s efforts to set up a “draft-day experience” that mimics, for the most part, what non-blind players would do on their draft day. The key difference being that the players in the ABFL have headphones or ear buds connected to their laptops or phones.

Yahoo also noted that built-in accessibility in it Fantasy app 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.