It appears Sonos is about to become less useable by screen reader
users. The CEO should stop it now, but here’s how to protect your
investment if he doesn’t – Mosen At Large
That is very concerning. The same question was asked by a blind Sonos
user on the Sonos Community forum and a Sonos staff member replied as
follows, that was about 2 weeks ago:
Yes, the new Sonos app has been tested with voice-over and will
continue to be accessible to voice-over users. We aim to keep
improving this experience and our ultimate goal is to have an even
better experience for voice-over users with our new app update.
Best regards,
Sieghard
*From:*viphone@googlegroups.com <viphone@googlegroups.com> *On Behalf
Of *Alan Lemly
*Sent:* Saturday, May 4, 2024 8:45 AM
*To:* VIPhone Email List <viphone@googlegroups.com>
*Subject:* Fwd: [Tech-VI] It appears Sonos is about to become less
useable by screen reader users. The CEO should stop it now, but here’s
how to protect your investment if he doesn’t – Mosen At Large
Sent from my iPhone
Begin forwarded message:
*From:* "David Goldfield via groups.io"
<david.goldfield=outlook....@groups.io>
*Date:* May 3, 2024 at 11:59:34 PM CDT
*To:* List <tech...@groups.io>
*Subject:* *[Tech-VI] It appears Sonos is about to become less
useable by screen reader users. The CEO should stop it now, but
here’s how to protect your investment if he doesn’t – Mosen At Large*
*Reply-To:* tech...@groups.io
https://mosen.org/sonos2024/
It appears Sonos is about to become less useable by screen
reader users. The CEO should stop it now, but here’s how to
protect your investment if he doesn’t
Jonathan Mosen <https://mosen.org/author/jmosen/>Posted on
04/05/2024 <https://mosen.org/sonos2024/> Posted in accessibility
<https://mosen.org/category/accessibility/>, commentary
<https://mosen.org/category/commentary/>
What is Sonos?
Sonos develop a series of high-quality smart speakers. They are
known for their ability to stay in sync throughout your home when
the speakers are grouped. Sonos speakers come in a range of form
factors, from portable devices all the way to soundbars.
You can send content to all current Sonos speakers via Apple’s
AirPlay, and some support Bluetooth. But integral to the Sonos
experience is its dedicated app. It is used to add speakers,
configure services, set alarms, modify system preferences, search
across streaming music services, add frequently used radio
stations and more.
Because the app is critical to the operation of a Sonos network,
those of us who are blind and have invested in the ecosystem have
done so based on trust. We trust that Sonos will act responsibly,
and not release an update to their app which, at worst, would turn
the investment blind people have made into unusable paperweights.
We rely on Sonos to keep their end of the bargain and ensure that
their updates adhere to good accessibility practices so their apps
are accessible with screen readers such as VoiceOver on Mac and
iOS, Talkback on Android, and various third-party screen readers
for Windows.
Unfortunately, it appears that Sonos is about to breach that trust
significantly, with a new app scheduled for release on 7 May.
This article outlines the problem and why it is such an egregious
act of bad faith on Sonos’s part. It then discusses how blind
people can hopefully protect and preserve access to the speakers
they have paid for, at least in the short term.
Seeking answers from Sonos
In late-April, Sonos announced a complete rewrite of their mobile
apps, due for release on 7 May. The separate tabs at the bottom of
the app will be gone. Instead, everything will happen on a single
screen the user can organise to suit their preferences.
There are certain triggering keywords for those of us who’ve been
in the accessibility advocacy space. When Sonos talked of the app
being “rewritten from the ground up” and a “new look and feel”,
that prompted questions at best, rang alarm bells at worst.
Immediately, the Living Blindfully <https://LivingBlindfully.com/>
email box started receiving email from anxious Sonos users,
wanting to know whether accessibility had been taken into account.
Some years ago, I wrote a book about Sonos which was responsible
for some blind people getting into the ecosystem. I have beta
tested for Sonos on and off. But the public announcement was the
first time I had heard that work was underway on a new app.
My hope was that capable blind people had been involved from the
early design stages of these new apps, because even if you know a
tiny bit about accessibility, you will know that it’s far easier
to build it into the foundation of your app rather than try to
retrofit it later. Plus, the latter approach usually means
accessibility isn’t done for the initial release. That has the
effect of turning blind people into second class customers. I was
cautiously optimistic given Sonos’s consistent commitment to
accessibility in recent years. It is that commitment which has
encouraged many blind people to embrace the platform.
Hoping for the best but fearing the worst, on 25 April I wrote to
Sonos’s CEO, Patrick Spence, asking if accessibility had been
taken into account when designing the new app. I explained the
anxiety that was beginning to emerge in the blind community given
that no mention had been made by Sonos of accessibility in any
communication on the new app.
I also invited him, or a representative of Sonos, onto Living
Blindfully so we could talk about Sonos’s ongoing commitment to
accessibility.
I did not receive a reply to that email, and of course it is
Patrick’s prerogative not to reply. I wrote to him because he has
been helpful in the past. I then sought answers on the Sonos
Subreddit, and was pleased that another blind Sonos user had
beaten me to it with a question about screen reader accessibility.
The very helpful Sonos staff member answering questions on the
Sonos subreddit didn’t have any immediate answers for us on
accessibility, which gave me yet another sinking feeling, but he
did undertake to research the matter and get back to the two of us
who had asked this question.
The response was as follows.
“At launch, the new Sonos app will have basic support for screen
readers. We know we have some work to do in this space, and the
team wants nothing more than to make sure everyone can enjoy
Sonos. Put plainly, accessibility is very important to Sonos.”
Subsequently I have come to understand that this response is the
standard response being posted on social media to any blind person
who asks this question.
The representative then offered to connect me with someone from
the Research Team.
Based on the experience of a tester, I believe Sonos has
overstated the accessibility of the new app, and I will return to
that later. But let’s separate the platitudes from the actions.
Sonos claim that accessibility is important to them. Is it really?
If it is, why are Sonos wanting blind people to talk to their
research team at a time that is too late to influence the first
release? User experience research for blind customers ought to
have been conducted at the same time as it was for everyone else.
Through their actions, or rather their inactions, Sonos is saying
that blind people who paid good money for their products must just
hurry up and wait.
I know there will be many devoted blind Sonos users who will
provide quality advice to their research team despite us being an
afterthought. But right now, blind people have a problem, and
Sonos has a bigger one. If they go ahead and release this app and
it substantially impedes our access to what we paid for, Sonos
could be in breach of consumer law and disability rights law.
How bad is it?
Unfortunately, I don’t have the firsthand experience to answer
that question directly. I have refrained from writing this post
for as long as I can, since a Sonos representative did indicate
they’d let me take the app for a spin. That hasn’t happened yet,
and time is running short.
I feel therefore that I must raise the alarm based on the user
experience of someone who has tested the app.
On Mastodon, I communicated with a blind person who said he is so
overwhelmed by how suboptimal the new app is on iOS with VoiceOver
that he doesn’t know where to start in terms of giving feedback to
Sonos. Does that sound like “basic accessibility” to you?
I encouraged him to try to tell me what’s wrong, and this is what
he came back with.
“For starters, it is really, really clunky and inefficient. The
area where you can see your system, there are 3 or 4 swipes to get
between each individual speaker, 5 depending on if it has a
battery or not. There’s a button in the main nav bar that says
system, but that button goes nowhere, from what I can determine,
swiping through lists is basically impossible. They don’t properly
scroll, and will randomly just jump you to the top of the screen.
By randomly, I mean quite often. Next… You can’t explore the
screen by dragging your finger around it. At all. This just simply
does not work. It acts as if the screen is blank. There’s no way
to navigate the different subsections of the main screen, because
of this and just because it’s just all in one huge linear sweep.
There’s so, so much more, but I guess these would be my worst issues.”
I have no reason to doubt this tester who is a competent and happy
user of the present Sonos iOS app.
I should add that a much-touted new feature is that Sonos is
releasing a web-based app. This tester says that it is completely
inaccessible.
It seems apparent then that Sonos has given scant attention to
screen reader accessibility throughout this project, and that they
are about to inflict a materially inferior experience on the blind
community while they go and do more research.
A test of ethics
After learning about how bad things appear to be, I wrote once
again to Patrick Spence, so far without receiving a reply,
highlighting the seriousness of this issue. For blind people who
purchased Sonos in good faith, this situation is nothing short of
a debacle and a travesty. I am calling on Patrick Spence to do the
decent thing, protect Sonos’s brand as a company that cares about
accessibility, and put the new app’s release on hold until it is
at least no worse than the current app. Treating paying customers
in this way just because they’re blind is offensive and wrong. It
is also technically inexcusable. Were I Patrick, I would be
demanding to know from the person responsible for this project why
they have placed Sonos in this invidious position. When you have
people already using your products, you don’t do something that
makes that product materially worse, and you don’t treat these
paying customers as so unimportant that you’ll deliberately choose
to get around to it sometime after the damage has been done.
Precautions blind people can take
Sadly at this point, I have lost any confidence that Sonos
believes blind people have the right to equal treatment, so I
suspect the release will happen on 7 May. I would love to be
proven wrong.
There are some steps you can take to protect your Sonos equipment
so you can still use it. I am writing these instructions from the
perspective of an iOS VoiceOver user. If you use Talkback on
Android, hopefully you can extrapolate the equivalent steps.
First, you’ll want to disable automatic app updates. Open Settings
on your iPhone, Navigate to App Store, and double tap. You’ll then
need to locate the heading that says “Automatic Downloads”. Under
that Automatic Downloads heading, you’ll find an option called
“Automatically Install App Updates”. Ensure that is turned off.
Once you do so, it will be necessary to manually approve every
update that gets installed on your iPhone. So from then on, you’ll
need to go into the app store, choose “My Account” at the top of
the screen, then pull down to refresh by swiping down with three
fingers until voiceover says “refreshing content”. The moment that
the Sonos app is there, you won’t be able to double-tap the
“Update All” button anymore, because that will cause the Sonos app
to update. So until this issue is behind us, you’re going to have
to be very careful not to double-tap that button.
For the moment, there is a second thing that I would suggest
doing, because it is not clear to me whether once the firmware on
your Sonos speakers updates, it’s going to require the new app. We
don’t want a situation where your speakers update themselves
automatically and you are forced to download the less accessible
app. To avoid this from happening, open the lovely accessible
current Sonos app. Double-tap the Settings tab at the bottom of
the screen, then double-tap System. Locate the “System Updates”
button towards the bottom of the screen. Double-tap it, then
you’ll find a toggle switch called “Update Automatically”. For
now, toggle that to off just in case new firmware for your
speakers is going to force this app update on you.
Conclusion
It is such a shame that disregard for accessibility from a company
can literally overnight turn equipment you’ve paid for and used
for years into a nightmare. I have fifteen Sonos devices as part
of my network at the moment, so it represents a significant
upheaval. This was absolutely avoidable with good UX design
practice and proper engagement with the blind community at the
right time. The right time was at the very beginning of the project.
Assuming Sonos doesn’t do the right thing and pull this release
until it is accessible, I will be placing the new app on a test
device and putting it through its paces. If the tester’s findings
are confirmed, then I suggest it’s vital that we band together to
protect our investment and get this wrong righted as quickly as
possible.
If you are a tester of the new apps with a screen reader, I would
love to hear from you. And if Sonos does provide me with access to
the app, I will update this post.
Happy listening.
David Goldfield,
Blindness Assistive Technology Specialist
If you need help using your assistive technology learn about my
training services by visiting
WWW.ScreenReaderTraining.com <http://www.screenreadertraining.com/>
Am Yisrael Chai
The Nation of Israel Lives!
JAWS Certified, 2022
<https://www.freedomscientific.com/Training/Certification/>
NVDA Certified Expert <https://certification.nvaccess.org/>
Subscribe to the Tech-VI announcement list to receive news, events
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