Optimizing Accessibility in Music Streaming Services : Research on how to provide access to music for the visually impaired

• Main Author: Sporrong, Klara
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Umeå universitet, Institutionen för tillämpad fysik och elektronik 2017
• Subjects: accessibility; music streaming; visually impaired; Interaction Technologies; Interaktionsteknik
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-136019

Accessibility is important in the development of digital products as well as in physical products. An accessible product enables all people to use it, whether they have a disability or not. This thesis focuses on accessibility for visually impaired people in a music streaming service on desktop. Many music streaming services for desktop are built with web technologies, including Spotify. The aim of this thesis was to evaluate the accessibility status of the Spo- tify desktop application as well as develop accessibility guidelines fo- cused on a music streaming service. A user test was performed to in- vestigate the accessibility status of the desktop application. Existing accessibility guidelines was studied and used together with the results of the user test to develop accessibility guidelines applicable to a music streaming service. It was found that the Spotify desktop application had many accessibility issues and these were considered when developing accessibility guide- lines. The existing guidelines studied was the WCAG 2.0 guidelines developed by W3C. These were read through completely and compiled in Chapter 4 of this report. The result of the thesis was accessibility guidelines suitable for a music streaming service on desktop. Since music streaming applications can be developed using different techniques and frameworks these guide- lines should be used as a guide on how to implement accessibility and needs to be customized for each use case. Though the fundamentals of the guidelines should be applicable to most music streaming desktop applications.