Every March I do an annual hunt for an online site to complete an NCAA basketball tournament bracket in an accessible fashion. I’ve yet to see one of the major sports sites figure out how to make this experience accessible. Terrill Thompson’s
accessible bracket work does deserve to be called out though as a positive example of what can be done. And of course if you know of other examples of good web accessibility here please let me know.
This year I opted to give Yahoo’s Tourney Pick’em for the iPhone app a try. Measuring accessibility by the fact that I was able to submit my bracket with relative ease, I have to say this app is worth trying.
The app is relatively straight forward to use. Game selections are made from a multitabbed and multipage interface. Each region (East, South, Midwest and west) as well as the final four are a separate tab when making selections. Rounds within a division are separate pages within that tab. Teams are selected by activating buttons named “pickemcheckmark blank” to the right of the team name.
If you prefer to use VoiceOver’s sweep right and left gestures to explore an app, it takes a couple explorations to figure out the pattern of what button is associated with each team. For example in the East region, once you get to the team area, sweep right gestures read items in this order for the first game with Syracuse selected to win.
Syracuse
Selected, pickemcheckmark blank
(1)
pickemcheckmark blank
(16)
North Carolina Asheville
The app is by no means perfect. Starting with the fact that “pickemcheckmark blank” leaves room for improvement in terms of button naming for accessibility purposes, you can easily find other instances of oddly named or completely missing names on buttons as you use the app. Live game action views for example have numerous nameless buttons.
Still this app is definitely a positive step. I’ve been able to successfully complete more than one bracket and better yet quickly compare my bracket with family and friends as talk of the NCAA tournament and The Wisconsin Badgers in particular has gone on this week. For the record I have Wisconsin losing to Ohio State as part of the Elite Eight and Michigan State tapped to win it all. But then again I can quickly submit another bracket with this app, at least for a few more minutes this morning.