Meet the Trio of Tech Startups Bringing Live Sports to Blind Fans

The founders of OneCourt, Field of Vision and Touch2See—based in Seattle, Dublin, and Toulouse respectively—weren’t all inspired by exactly the same clip, but the videos they did see were all variations on the same basic theme: a blind person having their hands guided by a companion across a facsimile of a soccer pitch in order to better understand what was happening in a live game.

Instead of quickly becoming yesterday’s news like most others, those videos gave the founders the same idea: to create a device that would change how visually impaired people watch sport forever. All three companies are examples of what OneCourt’s CEO Jerred Mace calls “tactile broadcasters.” And while each of the devices differ in subtle ways, they all aim to do the same thing—convert the on-field action into movement that the user can feel ...