To all visually impaired baseball fans: This is a pre-opening day update about accessibility improvements to mlb.com and the 2010 audio and video players. [NOTE: Updated information on these issues can be found on the Opening Day Post on this website. Information will also be updated on Brian Charlson’s website. You can read a summary of all posts on this website about Major League Baseball’s web accessibility initiative in the MLB.com Accessibility Category.

MLB has been working very hard to ensure that this year’s video and audio players are accessible, and the ACB MLB accessibility group has been working closely with them in this effort. One thing we have learned in the process is that changes to the whole site — not just accessibility — are being made up to the very last moment.

For that reason, we cannot tell you today the precise pathways to get to this year’s players, or even what this year’s audio and video players will be called. We do know that you should assume that any mlb.com bookmarks stored in your system will not work for the 2010 season.

Please give yourself time when you go to mlb.com, and please read and follow any instructions that will appear for those who use access technology.

Contacting MLB

If you experience difficulty on the site, we encourage you to explore MLB’s new Accessibility Information Page and the new accessibility FAQs. You can also contact mlb.com directly about accessibility issues as follows:

• FAQs: MLB.com will have dedicated accessibility FAQs on the site this year, as well as a more general Accessibility Information Page. We will post the direct urls to these pages when we have it, but know they will be reachable through an accessibility link on the home page. Please note that the new FAQs will likely not be posted until opening day (Sunday, April 4) and that current FAQs on the site may not be entirely accurate for the current season.
• Mlb.com’s email address for accessibility issues
• Mlb.com’s Customer Service telephone specifically for accessibility issues: 1-866-239-1284 (this line will be operational during the same hours that the main customer service line is open to the public)

We are confident that a new, stable accessible player for both audio and video will be available in the very near future. (While MLB is committed to accessibility for Mac users, current access to Flash players by Mac users who use screen readers has inherent limitations. We will provide more information for Mac users as we have it.)

We also know that despite everyone’s best efforts, we can anticipate that as the season gets underway there will be glitches not only in terms of accessibility but for all new or changing features on the site.

MLB has been a great and willing partner in this year’s accessibility efforts and we are confident that glitches will be resolved. We will be providing additional information as we have it.

You can also look for MLB accessibility updates on Twitter by following Brian Charlson (Twitter:@brian.charlson) or Lainey Feingold (@LFLegal)