Hello Listers, especially those who own Sonos products, Hello Mike from Sonos,
Sonos released an app update tonight. The single new feature that was mentioned is the ability to now play music that is in your music library on the phone and not just music that is stored on your PC or external hard drive. While this is a nice feature and it is perfectly accessible, I discovered that Sonos also broke a feature when Voiceover is running. A couple of updates ago Sonos announced that if you were in the Sonos app it was now possible to turn the playback volume on your Sonos player(s) up or down using the volume keys on the phone. This worked just fine and Voiceover volume was unchanged when Sonos volume was adjusted. In this most recent update I discovered that when I wanted to turn up the playback volume on my Sonos player nothing happened and instead Voiceover volume is being turned up even though Voiceover was not talking at that time. I turned Voiceover off with a triple click home and the volume up key worked just fine to turn up the playback volume on my Sonos player. It is clearly a new bug and while I will report this to Sonos I am afraid that their lack of response in the past regarding accessibility will mean that from now on a Voiceover user cannot use the volume buttons any more unless you first turn off Voiceover. I CC this message to Mike Carlino, one of the Sonos support people, and I urge all you Sonos users to send emails to Mike as well. I also posted the below message on the Sonos Facebook page, Apple is making a big deal of the accessibility features of the iPhone and more and more people are aware of Apple's fantastic work so I don't see why they shouldn't be aware of other companies who apparently couldn't care less about visually impaired users beyond the fact that we also paid to buy their product. Here is what I posted on the Sonos Facebook page: Top marks for the latest Sonos update if you are not visually impaired; for blind iOS users Sonos continues to disappoint. Apple has been emphasizing their commitment to accessibility in many areas. One of these includes Voiceover, a built-in screenreader which has been included into every iOS version for several years as well as into the OSX operating system. Voiceover allows a blind user such as myself full access to a touch screen device which due to its lack of tactile buttons used to be considered impossible. In true Apple fashion accessibility has been implemented and as Steve Jobbs was font of saying "it just works". Being able to use a popular device such as an iPhone out of the box without having to spend hundreds or even thousands of Dollars for specialty devices or software is truely revolutionary. Hundreds of developers have jumped onto the accessibility bandwagon and made improvements such a making sure buttons are properly labelled and information can be read with Voiceover. One exception is Sonos. I as well as a number of other blind iPhone users who also own Sonos players (8 of them in my case) have beged Sonos for over 2 years to make a few minor improvements and to make a commitment to accessibility which would ensure continued support for accessibility. One example is the fact that the "Previous", Play/Pause" and "Next" buttons are not labelled and are read by Voiceover as something like "vertical bar slash". I have been told by other developers that labelling a button is literally a matter of minutes yet Sonos releases update after update and just ignores the issue. In the most recent release which allows streaming of music that is on your iPhone Sonos took it a step further and broke the ability to adjust the volume of playback with the volume buttons, a feature they made a big deal of a couple of updates ago. The feature used to work, now turning the volume up increases the volume of the Voiceover screenreader and Sonos volume remains unchanged. This is not a big deal although the ability to change playback volume with the volume buttons is nice and it continues to work just fine if I turn Voiceover off so it is obvious that this bug was introduced in this update. I would love to buy a couple more Sonos players, but I am right now very worried that one day Sonos will release an update which will completely break the accessibility of the app and it will leave me with just under $4,000 of Sonos equipment which I will not be able to use any longer. I hope that by letting sighted users know about this some of you will support visually impaired Sonos users by letting Sonos know that this is important. Of course the number of blind Sonos users is very small as a percentage of all users, however making sure that people who have invested in a Sonos system are actually able to fully enjoy the product is simply the right thing to do especially since the app is probably 90% accessible and only a few minor improvements would be required. Sonos, if you have no intention to make such improvements, why not just say so outright instead of promising for years that improvements are forthcoming? Why not write on your home page "Sonos is not fully accessible for blind iOS users and Sonos as a company has chosen not to invest in improvements". -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "VIPhone" Google Group. To search the VIPhone public archive, visit http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/. 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