Recently I have discovered the world of fantasy football. Yes, I am female. Yes, I do like football. Yes, I am somewhat of a computer junkie. So it comes to a surprise to even me that I've taken this long to get into the game.
Since this is my soap box, I'll start from my beginning. A friend came to me and asked if I wanted to join a local league. I was intrigued. I'd wondered about fantasy football for a while. I'd tossed the idea around to see if it was something I could do to entertain myself. However, I never did anything about my desire for the simple fact that I knew it was played mostly online. And to a blind person, it's always a concern. Would I be able to use the website? Will my screen reader be able to access all the functions? Would it wind up being more pain than pleasure to play?
I know these thoughts of mine would undoubtedly send my blind friends and acquaintances into a tizzy. But hey, that's me! Anyone who knows me in real life understands I suffer from way too much stress. Not only that, but I have a bad habit of letting anything difficult stress the heck out of me, thus giving me massive migraines. If something seems more trouble than it's worth, I'd much rather take the high road.
Ahem. However, I digress. Despite having only marginal knowledge of how fantasy football works, I decided to go online and see if I could educate myself on the subject. Boy, did I get more than I'd bargained for! There are boatloads and boatloads of sites bursting with so much information regarding fantasy football, I became dizzy!
The one thing I can say I latched on to right away was reading about the history of fantasy football. I don’t' know about anyone else, but learning when fantasy football actually started was quite a surprise to me. I'd thought it had only been around for 15-20 years. In actuality, fantasy football was created back in 1962 and worked its way up into what it is today.
Well, I'd rather not turn this blog entry into a history lesson, so I'll finish this section by saying I came across many sites talking about the history. For anyone interested, wikipedia's entry is the easiest to get through. I know it's wikipedia, and even I'm not too hot on using it as a reference, however, I did click on some of the reference articles where the material was taken, and it appears legit. So if anyone feels like reading more about it, here you go.
Fantasy football (American) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Getting back to the present... My friend approached me asking if I wanted to join a local fantasy football league. Since this friend was also blind, I thought, well, there's strength in numbers, so any bumps can be weathered together.
Not having any clue about where to go or what to do, I had to ask my friend for many details about the first steps in getting into the local league. It was a bit of a concern for me when I was told that the league would be played on Yahoo Sports. I used Yahoo mail and chat years ago. But that was a long...time...ago. And I do not have fond memories of using yahoo. Despite my reservations, I went ahead and agreed to join the fantasy league. What do you know? To my utter amazement and pleasure, I found that Yahoo had finally taken measures to make things on their site more accessible to us blind folk.
Getting the league information and password from my friend was probably the easiest part, as I soon discovered. From there it was figuring out settings and understanding what needed to be done first.
Naturally, picking a name and choosing your settings came first. *Yawn* Yes, I know boring. So moving along, I went to the section that I figured was where I pick a line-up of players I wanted to draft.
At first I was a bit frustrated, as I read that the way to select and exclude players was done by dragging and dropping. Not something a blind person can do! But, much to my great relief and pleasure, I noticed at the bottom of the pre-ranking players page an option that said if you were having trouble with this page, click this version. Yes! Exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. Immediately the drag-and-drop features were replaced with drop-down boxes and links.
* SIDENOTE: For any blind folk—or heck, any person who has trouble with drag-and-drop—reading this, I want to insert a note here to say that my brother and I found out the very hard way that the "click this version" option is only available if you're creating your own league or are attempting to join a league created by someone else. Apparently, the publicly assigned Yahoo leagues don't offer the option. I will just end this note by saying that thankfully, my brother and I found a relatively easy way to continue pre-ranking your own players. I will explain our method in future posts. *
Anyway, thanks to the alternate version, instead of drag and drop, I was presented with drop-down menus, links and buttons. The kind of thing that every blind person wants to see on a site known for using flash.
Here's where, dear people, I confess that I showed my female genes and complete ineptness. What did I do you ask? I didn't do the basics. Which meant that I went and started ranking players by the names I recognized rather than taking the time to understand who's hot and who's not.
At this point I would use the words "epic fail", but unfortunately, my siblings have banned me from using that term. *LOL* Therefore, I will imitate the infamous Homer Simpson. *DOH!*
I need not describe the type of team that I drafted, because it would embarrass me too much. Let's just say it was bad and take it from there. Thankfully, I think I've picked myself up pretty good since then. I'm currently second to last in the league rankings, but it could have been worse. Much worse. *LOL*
I will end part one of this journal entry from a fantasy football newbie by saying that after week 1 of the NFL, I did some looking and learned that it wasn't too late to still create more fantasy teams on public leagues. It might come as a "duh!" to most people, but I didn't realize until I started listening to the local ESPN radio station and paid more attention to the fantasy football talk that it wasn't uncommon for people to have more than one team.
To be continued...
Friday, September 30, 2011
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