After a 17-year run of providing the industry leading and in many cases only example of an accessible NCAA tourney bracket, Terrill Thompson announced his retirement from the bracket business in a thoughtful blog post yesterday.
Thompson has pointed bracket enthusiasts to Yahoo’s Fantasy Tourney Pick’em and indicates having ongoing discussions with Yahoo staff about accessibility.
In announcing his retirement, Thompson has directed users to groups for both the Men’s and Woman’s tournaments on Yahoo’s site. Thompson indicates successful completion of bracket creation with JAWS and Chrome (Men’s) and keyboard only (Woman’s) use.
His blog post, which indicates more than 200 users of the accessible bracket service in some years has more details on issues he did encounter, with Thompson reporting he’s seen Yahoo make some changes already.
This Wisconsin Badger fan can report success in creating tournament brackets with JAWS and Edge on the desktop and VoiceOver and Yahoo’s Sports Fantasy app on the iPhone. Unfortunately, Wisconsin failed to make the tournament for the first time in several years.
In announcing his retirement, Thompson issued a challenge of sorts to the “huge corporations” behind tourney sites, such as ESPN, CBS Sports and more. Thompson wrote:
“I have always felt some deep reluctance to host a “separate but equal” website. Mainstream websites, including those featuring tournament pools and brackets, should be designed for everyone, not solely for mouse users with good eyesight. Accessibility has always been technically possible – the first version of the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines was published in 1999. If one lonely guy can create an accessible tournament site in his spare time, huge corporations like ESPN (Disney), CBS, and FOX should surely be able to do the same.”
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