Mediacurrent partners with Turner Sports to update 30 NBA team sites and improve accessibility.
Mediacurrent collaborates with Turner Sports to assist in the development and support of the National Basketball Association's (NBA) web properties. Turner Sports, a division of Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., is an industry leader in televised and online sports programming, airing championship-level sporting events on TBS, TNT, and truTV, and managing some of the most popular sports sites on the internet.
Our partnership has allowed for Drupal best practices from our previous experiences and built an alliance that drives truly spectacular results.
Mediacurrent worked alongside the team at Turner Sports to update all 30 of the NBA Team Sites making them accessible. This effort involved tasks ranging from ensuring colors were readable to updating the live scoreboard to have JS, AJAX, and PHP support.
Keyboard Accessibility Modifications and Focus: We implemented a solution for custom keyboard commands that were standard across browsers. This involved identifying the focus point and allowing the keyboard to navigate the site.
Contrast: The goal was to ensure minimum contrast levels of color/text. This required customizing CSS for the themes of several different team sites. As each team had its own unique color scheme, this was a task that required precision and focus.
Live Scoreboard: In order to make the live scoreboard accessible, we needed live data. We built a custom live score aural generation service in JS leveraging an HTML fragment parser to feed archived data as live. Then we were able to fully test and deploy a working solution.
The NBA’s multisite solution allows for individual team sites to be customized but doesn’t allow for full code control. This governance approach mitigates challenges with host, regression, and future compatibility. Additionally, this project demonstrated that an accessibility-first build approach is much more effective than retrofitting the site for all users at a later stage.