Spotify is one of the most popular music streaming platforms with over 356 million users around the world. And many users have different access needs. Spotify is continuously making accessibility improvements to the experience. These improvements will support more and more users to enjoy the songs and podcasts they love more easily. In this guide, we will show you three Spotify updates on the mobile experience in 2021: buttons with increased readability features, options for text resizing, and a beta for podcast transcripts.
Each change is a small part of Spotify’s long-term mission to improve the platform to a place that people can enjoy an immersive artistic experience.
1. All buttoned up
You are constantly tapping buttons to shuffle a playlist or start a listening session while using Spotify. Now, you can see some changes to these buttons from color, text formatting to size. Spotify makes it easier for low-vision and visually impaired users to spot and engage with these actions while they are using Spotify on their mobile phones. The update can also help users in situations where there’s low lighting or high screen reflections. Moreover, the change in the text formatting from all caps makes more space for translation or localization for the more than 60 languages that Spotify is supporting.
2. Living large
The Spotify app already reflects system-wide text size changes, known as Dynamic Type, to a certain extent. With these latest updates, users can increase the text, improving overall navigation on the app and listeners have greater control to customize their experience. Users can adjust the text size using Settings via iOS to fit their specific visual needs and preferences.
Follow these steps:
- On your phone, go to Settings > Accessibility, then choose “Display & Text Size.”
- Tap “Larger Text” to select larger font options.
- Drag the slider to choose your favorite font size.
- Adjusting the text too large might make you feel harder to tap buttons or other functions in the Spotify app. You can go back to your phone settings and adjust the font size whenever you need.
3. Spell it out
Spotify is introducing auto-generated podcast transcripts. This is a limited beta for choose Spotify Original and Exclusive podcasts using mobile phones. This new feature will help to automatically generate transcripts for these shows. Users can read the text of the specific podcast on their phones even with or without sound. Users can also quickly scroll and navigate through specific episodes, then start playing from any point by tapping on this paragraph.
This is the very first step of Spotify for the podcast transcript experience. The big ambition of Spotify is to make transcripts available across all podcasts on the platform. If you want to share your feedback, come to Spotify’s Community.
Spotify is trying to improve and create an inclusive experience for users. That’s why they are collecting data and doing research on their users and plan to evaluate and assess their ideas on an ongoing basis. Then Spotify will be available to everyone. With these new updates, Spotify is taking steps to progress toward that goal and users will have a better experience using this platform.