Law Office of Lainey Feingold
Disability Rights Legal Advocacy

The 2010 baseball season has started and with it come accessibility improvements to mlb.com. Yes, there will no doubt be glitches and outstanding issues as the season gets underway. We are confident that MLB wants to and will continue to make improvements, and we encourage fans with visual impairments to send specific feedback to MLB through the channels listed in this post.

In this post you can find information about the 2010 MLB media players and the new on-line accessibility resources on mlb.com. You can also find information on how to contact MLB about accessibility issues.

This is a pre-opening day update about accessibility improvements to mlb.com and the 2010 audio and video players. This information will be updated on this site and on Brian Charlson’s website.

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.

Two years ago today, on March 10, 2008, I launched this website, LFLegal.com. Back then, I had never heard of an anchor that wasn’t on a boat, and didn’t know an ordered list from a market list. But Mike Cherim built me an accessible web site and taught me how to use it. Today, even though most people I know have sites far older than mine, I’m happy to be celebrating the beginning of LFLegal’s third year.

Blind Sox Fan Gets MLB to Even Game

Like any true Red Sox fan, Brian Charlson attends as many games as possible and listens to the rest, play by play, on the radio. But when it came to reading stats, his blindness sometimes got in the way. Not any longer. At the urging of Charlson and fellow advocates, Major League Baseball rolled out a series of accessibility features this week on all league and team websites aimed at making statistics, ticketing, and other information fully accessible to the visually impaired.

“It’s exciting that MLB has joined with us in this effort, hearing what the blindness community needs to take full advantage of this wonderful thing that is baseball. They are setting the stage for other sports to do likewise. Next season I’ll be asking the NFL, and I’ll say, ‘See what MLB can do? You don’t want to be outshined by the MLB.’”

Web more accessible to those with disabilities

(article appearing on page 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle on January 1, 2010, by staff writer Alejandro Martínez-Cabrera)

San Francisco, CA (January 1, 2010)– During her high school years, Lisamaria Martinez, who has been visually impaired since she was 5, carried a 25-pound backpack to school crammed with books written in Braille.

But once she was introduced to the Web at UC Berkeley, she started getting professors’ class notes by e-mail, using text-to-speech software, and trading heavy Braille tomes for a few words and a click on a search engine.

Congratulations to New York State Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo’s office for its announcement this week of a comprehensive accessibility settlement with HSBC Card Services. Read the NY AG’s press release. The settlement, negotiated by attorney Jeffrey Powell in the Bureau of Consumer Frauds and Protection, addresses web accessibility, alternative formats for visually impaired customers, relay service for deaf and hearing impaired customers, and other important accessiblity issues. Under the Agreement, the HSBC web site will satisfy Conformance level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, promulgated by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (w3c) no later than May 31, 2010.