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Re: Screen Reader Usable Baseball Standings

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From: KellyFord
Date: May 8, 2018 3:18PM

Hi,

This is a good idea as a supplement because it can benefit a range of users but shouldn't be the default or replace the need to support accessible tables appropriately. I might be wanting an entirely different column that you think I do. Some of these standings tables have multiple data points and in fact the experience that started me on this was my discussing a column that most people wouldn't want by default. I was looking for how different teams did against other teams with winning and losing records to support something I had told someone about a particular team. That particular information isn't even available on most web sites but when I did find out, it caused me to end up viewing several sites.

I think it is also important to keep in mind that as a user I'm not looking for someone to explain something to me. I'm looking for the data to make my own judgements and interpretations.

That's by no means meant to discourage exploration of descriptive statistics and better summarizations for everyone. There does come a point when reviewing data points to answer questions becomes tough.

In fact Baseball Reference, one of the sites I mentioned, is starting to add something like what you've talked about as they adopt more video. There is an interesting blog post on this at https://www.sports-reference.com/blog/2018/04/a-new-chapter-at-sports-reference/.

I also look forward to the various technologies that are being developed that will allow for all users to ask more detailed questions. As I said, reviewing data points can get tough.

From a different arena for example, I'd guess that people who can look at a weather map showing temperatures for a country can make a pretty good approximation to the question where is the warmest place in country x. Studying a table of temperatures to do the same would be tough. Yet last time I tried this, I didn't have success with either a text based search or the systems of Siri, Cortana, Google and Alexa to be able to answer that basic question.

Kelly