I don’t follow tennis, and never have. But I follow what happens when a major broadcaster decides that blind and low-vision fans deserve more than a compliance afterthought, because those decisions tend to set the bar for every other product and service I rely on as a screen reader user.

That is why Wimbledon’s latest announcement caught my attention.

A Broadcast That Hears the Match

This year, for the first time, the All England Club has launched HawkAR: Inclusive Feed, built with AKQA and Hawk-Eye Innovations. It combines two technologies that have existed separately for years. Hawk-Eye’s ball and player tracking data now feeds AKQA’s Action Audio system, which turns it into a real-time 3D soundscape: you hear a shot’s speed and direction as it happens. Alongside it, a high-contrast visual overlay marks bounce points and shot paths for fans with low vision. Every singles match on Centre Court is being broadcast this way, live on BBC iPlayer, from the first day of the main draw.

Jonny Marshall, Operational Research Officer at the Royal National Institute of Blind People, worked on the project and put it plainly:

“Following a fast-paced rally on traditional broadcasts can be incredibly difficult without full sight. This initiative gives blind and partially sighted tennis fans access to watch games on a par with their sighted peers. Co-designed directly with our community, it sets an incredible new benchmark for inclusive sport.”

Jonny Marshall, Operational Research Officer, Royal National Institute of Blind People

This Is Not Just a Broadcast Fix

What struck me most is that Wimbledon has not stopped at the broadcast. The same visit that gets you HawkAR on iPlayer also comes with an Accessibility Guide covering travel, seating and facilities, and a Visual Story designed specifically to help visitors know what to expect before they arrive: useful for autistic visitors, for people with sensory processing differences, for anyone who finds an unfamiliar environment easier to manage once they can picture it first.

On site, there is an Accessibility Services Kiosk, free Amex Radios for guests with visual impairments, sunflower lanyards for visitors whose disability is not visible, a dedicated Quiet Room, Changing Places facilities, and a step-free route mapped across the Grounds. None of that is glamorous. All of it is the difference between a fan who can attend and one who cannot.

The Same Pattern I Saw at the World Cup

I wrote a few weeks ago about what FIFA has done for accessibility at the World Cup 2026: audio-descriptive commentary for every match, sign language interpretation across three countries, haptic devices, sensory rooms. My argument then was that good inclusion is not one solution for disabled people treated as a single category. It is layered provision across the range of what people actually need.

Wimbledon is doing the same thing on a smaller footprint: broadcast innovation, physical accessibility, and information design, all built at once rather than bolted on afterwards.

Why Inclusion and Innovation Keep Turning Up Together

This is not a coincidence, and it is not new, even if it still surprises people. Curb cuts were built for wheelchair users. They are now used by parents with pushchairs, delivery workers with trolleys, travellers with wheeled suitcases, and anyone on a bike. Nobody designed curb cuts for the general public. The general public simply turned out to need them too, and once they existed, everybody used them. The television remote control tells the same story: a workaround so someone did not have to get up to change the channel became one of the most used objects in every home, disabled or not.

HawkAR is following the same path. It was built to solve a specific problem: how do you let someone who cannot fully see a serve still follow the match? But a 3D soundscape of a tennis rally is not only useful to blind fans. It is a genuinely new way to experience the sport, and I would expect plenty of sighted viewers to switch it on once they know it exists. Accessible design does not just widen the door. It often builds a better room, and everyone ends up standing in it.

My Take

Wimbledon has not solved the whole problem. HawkAR currently covers Centre Court singles only, and only via BBC iPlayer, which limits it to UK viewers. The rest of the tournament, and every fan outside the UK, is still working with a traditional broadcast. That gap is worth naming, in the same way I named the sync issues in FIFA’s audio description app. Good intentions do not automatically reach everyone at once.

But the direction is right, and it echoes what FIFA showed a few weeks earlier. Accessibility works best as infrastructure, not an afterthought. Build the audio description into the broadcast pipeline. Build the visual story into how people plan a visit. Build the sunflower lanyard into how staff are trained. None of it has to be perfect on day one. It has to be there, and it has to keep growing.

If you know a blind or low-vision tennis fan, point them to HawkAR: Inclusive Feed in the Audio Described section of BBC iPlayer. And the next time someone asks why a business should spend money making something accessible, point them to a curb cut, a remote control, or a soundscape of a tennis rally that sighted fans are about to discover they want too.

Source: Hawk-Eye Innovations and Action Audio Debut Inclusive Feed for Wimbledon’s Centre Court, published 29 June 2026. Additional detail from Wimbledon 2026 Sets a New Standard for Accessibility in Sport, Vision Ireland and the Wimbledon Accessibility visitor guide.