If I were to ask you what is the nerdiest way to be a sports fan, I am sure that one of the first responses would be, playing fantasy sports. The statistics, the constant game updates, the rankings lists, draft preparations, podcasts, and data that is available and consumed. All in the pursuit of winning a fake championship in a fake game that you have no actual athletic involvement in. And yet, I love it, even though I know it is wildly nerdy and hard to follow if you are not “in the know.”

I have participated in/played fantasy sports for almost three decades now. I have been playing since before the days of the Internet even. My earliest fantasy baseball leagues tabulated the statistics for each team manually, using the weekly Baseball America newspaper and its individual game statistics. The league commissioner would buy the newspaper and then sit down and spend hours going through it to get each players data, then enter it into a spreadsheet to tally the scores. That sounds so archaic now doesn’t it? Now of course, we have an almost unlimited amount of data sources, YouTube videos, and experts at our fintertips to give us exactly what we need to win that all-important fake championship. We can even use apps on our phones and tablets to give us up-to-the-minute results which I also love. 

But, when I lost my vision, I thought that was the end of this wonderful hobby for me. How could I ever keep up with all of this fire hose of information and be able to change my lineups and be competitive without being able to see? For a few years, I wasn’t able to. The first reason is that I just wasn’t ready yet to try. Then, when I was, the apps that I used to manage and run the leagues were simply not accessible. One in particular, Sleeper, was the main app that we used to run our fantasy football league. It was terrible for accessibility, essentially impossible for blind players to navigate. So, I advocated for the blind community and reached out to the development team behind the app. The response I got was simple. “We have no plans to include accessibility in our apps and services at this time.”

Not to be deterred, I began researching which fantasy sports service and apps might work for me. I came across a video about Yahoo Fantasy where they had a league of all blind players using their app and website to run their football league. Yahoo had utilized blind players in their development of their service and as a result, their app worked great with screen readers.

This meant I would be able to play again, and I have been for about a year now. My fantasy football mates were willing to switch to Yahoo so that I could play and I am so thankful to both Yahoo and my league, because it was so great to be able to fully participate again in something that I love so much. I am currently halfway through the 2026 fantasy baseball season, my team is in 4th place with a 10-5 record. Even with a ton of injuries, I have been able to keep up with it all, making daily adjustments as needed and the Yahoo Fantasy app reads it all to me. 

More than just reading it out to loud to me, it has re-opened the door for me to get one more piece of myself back. And that, is more valuable than any championship trophy, real or even the not so real ones. Because, even if it’s not real to you, it is definitely real to me.