MLB At Bat: Batting

I have something to confess. I am one of god’s most pathetic creatures. I am a Boston Red Sox fan. Even though I had to quit little league after getting hit in the face trying to play catch on sidelines, I still love the game. My one season of little league involved a total of two hits (both off my best friend at the time) and playing outfield by listening for the ball to land so I could find it. Despite all this, I am a big fan. When I go to a game, I need someone to narrate the action and read me the scoreboard. Regardless, baseball is the only sport I follow with any attention.

A few years ago, we moved away from Fenway Park, far out of the broadcast range of NESN and WRKO (the cable and radio homes of the Sox). Fortunately, MLB offered a online audio subscription, letting me listen to the games at my desk. But is has been hard to stay stuck to my desk night after night.

MLB At Bat: Games

This year, MLB has offered a new solution. MLB’s At Bat 2009 is MLB’s iPhone app. How cool, you ask, is that? Pretty cool is the answer and it is not entirely inaccessible. The app is very similar in look to the flash-based service they offer for the desktop. This gives it some advantages and some disadvantages to the visually impaired user. The  app opens with a list of current games and scores. From there, you can pick a particular game. From there, you can see a field layout with players, a batter window with at bat history, a list of games videos and a window with game stats. A single click on any screen with pull up the audio feeds (home and away radio stations) for that game.

MLB At Bat: Audio

The most accessible piece of the app is the audio feed. This lets any iPhone owner listen to any game anywhere from the radio station of their choice. Listening to the game is easy as can be and offers no other control than volume. Simple audio is simply accessible. Besides the radio streams, the next most accessible feature is the color scheme for the main page and for the audio control panel, both of which feature a light font on a dark background.  The video clips for each games and the video stream for selected game (available with the most recent update) are accessible as any video can be on such a tiny screen. The video quality is good and comes with the usual TV commentary.

MLB At Bat: Video Clips

The app lacks some pretty basic accessibility features. There is no zoom capability and  no widescreen (landscape) mode. These would help tremendously, especially when trying to read the game stats and play-by-play games summaries.  There is not control over font or color schemes, but the app’s neat design is not amenable to that much customization. There is no need to for this app to be so wedded to the iPhone’s screen size. Allowing for some zoom or a widescreen mode would make this much easier to use.

All in all, I heartily recommend this app, if only for the audio streaming feature. Despite the few strikes against it, being able to listen to the games anywhere is at least a ground rule double in my book.

Read more iPhone accessibility reviews here on my iPhone Access page. MLB.com At Bat 2009 is available on iTunes.

Tags: accessibility, app, at bat 2009, baseball, iphone, iPhone app, mlb, sprts

This entry was posted on June 29, 2009 at 7:15 pm and is filed under large print. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.