3 Updates on the Spotify Mobile Experience to Help Improve Accessibility
Spotify is part of the lives of over 356 million people around the world—and we’re cognizant that many of our users have different access needs. We’re continuously making accessibility improvements to the experience to help many of our users enjoy the songs and podcasts they love more easily. So today, we’re introducing three updates to Spotify on iOS and Android: buttons with increased readability features, options for text resizing, and a beta for podcast transcripts.
These will all be rolling out in the coming weeks. We believe each change is part of our long-term mission to create a platform where everyone can enjoy an immersive artistic experience.
1. All buttoned up
When you use Spotify, you’re constantly tapping buttons to shuffle a playlist or start a listening session. Today, you may notice some changes to these buttons in terms of color, text formatting, and size. Our aim is to make it easier for low-vision and visually impaired users to spot and engage with these actions when using Spotify on their phones. The update can also aid users in situations where there’s low lighting or high screen reflections. Plus, changing the text formatting from all caps creates more space for translation or localization for the more than 60 languages Spotify currently supports.
2. Living large
The Spotify app already reflects system-wide text size changes, known as Dynamic Type, to a certain extent. With the latest accessibility updates, we’re enabling users to increase the text even more, improving overall navigation on the app and giving listeners greater control to personalize their experience. Users can adjust their text size under Settings via iOS to meet their specific visual needs and preferences.
Here’s how:
- On your phone, head to Settings > Accessibility, then select “Display & Text Size.”
- Tap “Larger Text” for larger font options.
- Drag the slider to select the font size you want.
- Making the text too large might make it hard to tap buttons or other functions within the Spotify app. You can always go back to your phone settings and adjust the font size as needed.
3. Spell it out
In the coming weeks, we’re also introducing auto-generated podcast transcripts. This is a limited beta for select Spotify Original and Exclusive podcasts across iOS and Android. The new feature will automatically generate transcripts for these shows, allowing users to read the text of the specific podcasts on their phones either with or without sound. Users will also be able to quickly scroll and navigate through specific episodes and click on any written paragraph to start playing from that point.
This is just the first step for the podcast transcript experience: Our overall ambition is to enable transcripts across all podcasts on Spotify. As always, we want to know your thoughts, so head over to our Community to share your feedback.
We care deeply about creating an inclusive experience, which is why we’re working with people with disabilities to conduct user research and plan to evaluate and assess our ideas on an ongoing basis. We want to make Spotify available to everyone, and with these new updates, we’re taking steps to progress toward that goal.
