IN today’s ever increasing demand for instant information, not all choices are created equal. When you weight that immediate information against the streaming backdrop that can result in delays of 1-2 minutes from the live linear radio and TV experience, some times those notifications spoil the game you are otherwise on the edge of your seat for.
I have breaking league alerts turned on for ESPN and the various league apps on my phone. I don’t use the MLS app because I find it too frustrating, more on that shortly.
Tonight was a perfect example of this tug of war when it comes to information. I’m alerted that Michael Lorenzon has a no-hitter going to the 9th, so living in Texas, I’m going to get that via a streaming platform, in this case via audio through either my SiriusXM or MLB aps. But those audio streams are both well over a minute behind what I would have heard if I could have picked up the live radio signal from Philly. So as the game was near it’s end and alerts start going off on my phone, since I use a screen reader as a blind person, I had to turn off the speech so I would not hear what the alert was saying. Did he get the no-hitter, was it broken up with two outs? I wanted to enjoy hearing the result via the broadcast, not find it out from a notification on my phone. The notifications are great when you are in situations where maybe you don’t have the ability to focus on a broadcast or where pulling it up is not reliable, such as when you are flying on an airplane and more demanding streams are not as reliable as the quick text alerts via the push notifications. But there is always this choice we have to current make as a sports fan.
Not all of the notification processes are setup equal though and in terms of accessibility, not all of the apps are as friendly as you would like them to be. So what I am going to share this morning is what the experience is like setting up notifications via the various apps and some thoughts on the type of notifications and their value. A later post is going to talk about the quality of what those notifications look like in greater detail as I test some particular items that I will explain below.
First, let’s start with the two media aps and I’m speaking about all of these from an iOS point of view as that is my preferred platform. I have found that the easiest two aps to configure and figure out in terms of layout when navigating using a screen reader are ESPN and CBS Sports. When you first setup the CBS app, it takes just a second to get things going but once you get to the screen where you can pick teams, that process is very quick and reliable.
When you select a team from a given sport, let’s use the Astros as an example in MLB, the app chooses some notifications you might want to have on for the team, such as team news, score change, game start and final. There is also a league notifications for MLB and that is off, once you turn that on for league news, you will see that it is in the on position when you add another team. CBS has a very customizable baseball alert package, you can get an update every time there is a scoring change in the game for your team, you can get an update on the game status at the end of every inning or every third inning. They also have an extra innings notification and a close game notification. If you want less detail, you can just keep it simple and go with something as limited as game start and final. One thing unique to baseball and soccer unlike the other sports, is that you in some apps can get starting lineup notifications. With the MLB alerts, CBS does not offer the starting lineup, but that is something I personally can live without.
In terms of what ESPN gives you, the package is similar, though when you choose an MLB team for their alert package, only team news and final score are chosen as on, game start interestingly is off. Like CBS they offer the ability to get an update on every scoring play, or what they call a third, sixth, final option, you can turn both on if you wish. ESPN doesn’t offer the status update after every inning and they don’t offer an extra innings alert. It does appear from some testing though that if you have the third, sixth, final option turned on, you are then told if a game is going to extras. ESPN also like CBs has the close game alert that you can choose and unlike CBS, they have a unique starting lineups button you can turn on or off, note that this is only a baseball offering on ESPN. Also, ESPN handles team and league alerts as separate items, so if you want team alerts but not league wide alerts, team news for the teams you are following would just focus on those teams. If you tap the alerts for MLB the NFL, NHL or NBA, it will turn on league alerts and in the case of football and basketball, you have a draft option you can turn on, in baseball and football, a fantasy option. Hockey is just news from the league. MLS is a bit different on ESPN in that it gives you the option to follow just MLS or other soccer news as well.
The NFL, NHL and NBA options on ESPN and CBS are all very similar. All give you a team news feature and the league option, these work the same way as what I described in the baseball example. Football and hockey give you the options for every scoring play and or end of quarter/period updates, close game options are also provided if you want that. IN the NBA, the alerts are tied to the end of the quarter if you want those in addition to the close game and final score. CBS unlike ESPN offers and overtime selection that you can use in all three of these sports.
CBS with these three sports like baseball by default is going to give you the game start and end for each team plus news, scoring change is also on for football and hockey, the end of quarter/period options are off in all three sports, with the final score obviously turned on. ESPN gives you by default team news, game start and final, interesting that the game start is on by default in these three unlike baseball with the ESPN app.
In terms of the ease of setting up these apps from an accessibility viewpoint, CBS crushes ESPN hands down. First ESPN limits the number of teams you can get to about 150, it appears that CBS has no limits at all, at least I have not run into one when testing them. With CBS, it is very obviously what the status of the button is when you tap it, it turns on or off should you want to flip it from the status it appears in when looking at your various options. The app is very responsive and does not drag at all. This is absolutely not the case with ESPN and often when you have tapped a team, you later will discover that your selection did not register because each time you tap a team, the app lags behind to register that team choice as one of the categories you now want to follow. It is a rather frustrating experience.
Before I compare the league apps, a note on MLS which I don’t use because of a frustrating experience. While it is technically and accessible app, the design does not play nice with screen readers and you have to be a very experienced user of the technology to make the app work. Also when you select a team, it automatically loads three notifications but because the app has a limit on how many notifications you can receive, you can’t set up alerts on every team. So after you add a few teams, you have to go in and remove some notifications in order to then go and add the rest of the teams from the league. At the league alert level, MLS gives you an option for every goal or a start, half and full status, which gives you an alert when the game starts, when it gets to the half, when the second half starts and when it is over. While I don’t mind the update at the half, I find the update that we are coming back from half time to be of no value.
As for the league apps, there are various things to like about them and areas for improvement. Here, the NFL is by far the most frustrating app, so I will talk about it last. Starting with MLB, at the league level you can turn on or off news which focuses on breaking league news and some times they will send out a notification to a story about the league such as the playoff chase. At the team level, you can get news, game start and final, score change, lead change, pitching change, condensed game and video highlights. MLB on its app does not offer an inning by inning or every third inning update like the media apps, the only way you would no a game was in extra innings would be to get an update via a pitching change, lead change or scoring change alert which does tell you the game score and inning when the play has occurred. The pitching change update tells you what the status is in terms of base runners when the new pitcher is coming into the game.
I personally would not mind having the inning status updates if you wanted to get less frequent updates but still have n idea of how things were going in the game. Where I have issues with MLB is that their news option gives you too many updates. If you have news on for each team and the league sends out a reminder about all star voting, you are going to get 30 alerts, one for every team. That should be made into some sort of other category that you can turn on or off at the team level. MLB also sends out the starting lineups, but it is part of the news notifications, you don’t have a separate choice that you can make here either. Also MLB will often send a news alert with a note about some major play that just happened, a couple minutes after you were alerted to that play if you had your scoring or lead change alerts turned on. Those kind of alerts about big plays should be provided if you chose the in game video highlights, I think of news as important alerts like trades, suspensions, or injuries during a game. MLB also does not usually do a good job of alerting that a game is delayed for one reason or another and when it says a game is about to start, that notification goes out 25 or 30 minutes before the actual start, some times the game never does start because a storm comes back over the ballpark. They should do like ESPN and CBS in that respect and send the alert when the game is actually literally starting.
The notifications process with the MLB app is as perfect as you can get when it comes to accessibility and it is very easy to use. The NBA and NHL apps also score perfect when it comes to access in the notification area. The NBA app is a bit more tricky some times trying to follow teams as you have to follow them in order to setup the alerts, this is not the case in the other three league apps. The NBA choices are just like what you get from the media companies, game start and end, team news, quarter end, close game and unlike the media companies, the NBA has the useless coming back from half time feature that I don’t have a need for. The NBA app by default when you follow a team to setup alerts has the game start and end options turned on. Interestingly, their app also does not offer the overtime alert like CBS, I assume that would just be implied via the quarter end alerts if you have a tie game after the 4th quarter.
The NHL has perhaps the most customizable app. You can get what they call warmup in addition to game start and final, plus you can choose to be alerted on every goal, the end of the period, for close games, going to overtime or going to a shootout. The close game setting can be done at either the individual team level or the league level. At the league wide level in addition to news, one cool feature if you follow or favorite a team is that you can get goal horns for your alerts when you get notifications that the given team scored a goal or when a game ends in victory for that team. So if you followed both the Stars and Blackhawks, the Chicago horn would score for each of their goals, likewise for Dallas and when the final score came in, you would hear the horn of the winning team. At the team level, the default items that are set to on are news, game start and final.
Now for the NFL. This app is not quite as frustrating as MLS, but it is close. There are several buttons on the app that are not properly marked and so what you hear is button, with no description of what that button does. Note that to setup notifications, on the main screen you will find an unmarked button if you are using a screen reader. Tap that button and then swipe for a while and you will get to the notifications, which you can setup. At the league level, there is a breaking news option and a news and highlights option. I chose just the breaking news option. There is also a close game alerts you can choose. At the team level, the NFL by default gives you game start and final, you can also choose scoring play alerts, like MLB and unlike the media apps, you can’t get updates by the inning/quarter and so you don’t truly have a since for how a game in progressing until a scoring play happens or if you get an alert about a close game. Two of the six alerts on the screen I have no use for, team shop and team tickets, so all you are choosing is game start, final scores, scoring play and a news/highlights option. It would be helpful again to have an option that is just more hard news, separate the highlights to a different option and having the quarter by quarter update is another nice thing that I wish that app would provide.
Two other bones to pick with the NFL concern accessibility and the alert style. First, their app is not as easy to follow in terms of knowing what you are choosing, because you hear the name of a button on or off, then after that you swipe and hear what it goes to. In other word, you hear button on, then you have to swipe to hear that it is assigned to final score. The name of what that button does should be read when you are first moving on to that button. IN addition, the app some times lags like ESPN and so it is not always clear if your choice registered, so you have to go back and look to make sure it did what you wanted. Finally, the back button is an invisible graphic, so want to go from the Cowboys to the Texans, when you finish with one, swipe all the way to the left until you get an alert that you can go no further, then tap on that and what do you know, you are back at the beginning of the list of teams to choose from.
The other big issue with the NFL app, double alerts! Let’s say you have alerts for all teams in certain situations turned on, it doesn’t matter if it is game start, scoring play, or final score. When an alert comes in about that game, you are sent two alerts if you are following both teams. No other sports app does that, because they are designed to be smart enough to know that the final score alert for Marlins verses Astros need only be sent once if the user is set to get the alert for both Miami and Houston since they are playing one another. This is true for all the other league apps, only the NFL falls short in this area.
There are a couple other things I need to test and I am going to address these in a follow up post. What happens if a replay changes the outcome of a scoring play. Some times the MLB app will alert on a scoring play, but no alert is sent if that play was undone. There was a game a year or two ago where it appeared the home team had won on a walk off hit that scored two runs. The first alert said final score, home team winning with the score. But then a funny thing happened, another alert came in and the score was changed, the batter was out, the runs didn’t score and now the visiting team won. MLB has never during the replay era sent out corrections on these kind of updates, which I find very frustrating. This is something I’m going to test for a while with ESPN and CBS on specific teams to see if either of them do a better job on handling such situations. I’m also going to test those apps alongside the NFL and NHL for the same type of concern.
Finally, a note about the notifications when a game ends. ESPN send the alert with the team letter abbreviation such as CHI for the Bulls and MIA for the Heat, then it also includes the team names and the final score. I personally find that to be unnecessary, you have already told me it is an NBA game with the basketball emoji, you can just say bulls and Heat with the final. That is how the NBA app does it, in fact all the league apps alert by team names, no city and no city abbreviation codes. When it comes to baseball alerts of this type, MLB tells you the winning and losing pitcher, not the save, ESPN includes the save. ESPN though refers to the pitcher by first name Initial and last name, MLB gives you the whole name of the pitcher which I like. I need to test CBs to see what their approach is. One thing CBs does that I find personally of no value, the point spread. I don’t need to know what the spread was on a given game, I just want the final score. To me, if you bet on the Bulls to cover against the Heat and you knew your bet was Chicago plus 9 and Miami only won by 5, then you already know you won the bet.
IN a follow up post, I will write more about the way the various media apps alert about game status and news stories and compare them to the league apps. Since I am going to wait for the beginning of basketball and hockey this October to also file those comparisons, you will see an updated post in this space around the time the World Series is getting ready to start.
Blind Baseball Perspective 