New Sonos App and Accessibility

The post to which I reply begins with the following sentence:

“At Sonos, we take accessibility seriously and aim to build listening experiences that everyone can enjoy.”

While it strikes the right tone and says all the right things I must confess to feeling a bit of incredulity. There was a time when my faith and trust in Sonos’ commitment to #Accessibility was unwavering. For over time, their consistent commitment therein demonstrated year after year and update after update and through advancement after advancement was unmatched in the audio space.

Reading the words a new and improved app often causes a bit of trepidation in the hearts of those of us who are blind and low vision as all too often this means storm clouds of regression in terms of accessibility and a degradation of usability efficiency and enjoyment may be on the horizon.

Nevertheless, based on the equity Sonos had built up in my trust account over the years when people started to express their concerns, I confidently asserted that there was nothing to fear. Sonos had done right by me and others for over 14 years and I’d give them the benefit of the doubt until I had reason not to do so.

Sadly, the news of recent days has caused me to apologize for my earlier assertions and embrace the fact that in part trust has been broken or at the very least eroded.

While it is commendable that Sonos as a company is putting forth statements recognizing the situation; and while there’s hope that going forward these regressions in accessibility and usability for those of us who are blind or low vision may be remedied. The undeniable truth is that this situation could have and should have been prevented and avoided if only inclusive design and accessibility along with the segment of the user base most impacted by them had been factored into the design process at its inception from the ground up.

Neither accessibility nor those who most benefit from it should be viewed as an after thought necessitating a retrofit solution.

Many of us have chosen to support the Sonos brand and its products with the power of our purchasing dollars and many of us can say we’ve done so to the tune of a significant investment. Our support and business should be as valuable as anyone else’s.

Here’s hoping the future of this company, its products and faithful purchasers, supporters and users will be brighter than this current season and that we who have chosen to support the brand with our purchasing dollars and loyalty will be treated more respectfully going forward.

" At Sonos, we take accessibility seriously and aim to build listening experiences that everyone can enjoy"

LMFAO.…

Since S2 I can't count the number of times Sonos can't find the Wifi, looses one speaker randomly, the thousands of hours I spent chatting with their support.…

I've been told to either change the WiFi bandwidth, the channel, etc.... if Sonos products are so Wifi sensitive, they should probably invest more in dealing with Wifi signal rather than a new Software.

If it wasn't for the investment I made by buying all my speakers, I would have changed for another technology. I couldn't advise more someone considering buying their products, to think twice.

You spend thousands of hours with their support? 

Probably yes....

I am a voiceover user on IOS and have just updated the app. Really disappointed that the accessibility has regressed in this way. I am an accessibility consultant as well as being blind myself and have used Sonos for many years. I wish accessibility had been looked into a lot more before this update but what is done is done and I just hope the fixes that are promised come ASAP.

As a loyal Sonos customer of over 10 years, it is extremely sad to see Sonos has turned into a company that will happily publish a statement emphasizing commitment to accessibility, only to then release an app which, at least on iOS, is not at all accessible using the VoiceOver screenreader.

If your company’s development workflow does not include both automated and manual accessibility testing, then truthfully there is no honest commitment to accessibility there, I say this as someone who has been working in both software development and QA engineering for the past several years.

I am a European Sonos customer, and this latest update has turned my Sonos products (some of which are still under warranty) into essentially unusable paperweights. This clearly violates consumer protection laws within the European Union, and I’m currently figuring out how to best exercise my consumer rights given this situation.

Regardless of how long it will take to release a new version of the app containing accessibility fixes, whether this will be in a week or even in a day, there should not be any doubt about the fact that this should never have happened in the first place. Testing for accessibility during the development process is an industry standard these days, and for a well-established company like Sonos there is simply no excuse for failing to adopt such best practices.

For me it’s clear that the time to switch over to a different audio system has come, thankfully Sonos isn’t the only company out there making these.

Where are the widgets?

This update worse than useless.

I update to the new app.
The app crashed all the time.
when I uninstall the app, the first time opening is ok, After that the app crashed again.

Please fix

Hi. There is no update on the Apple App Store. I do not understand.

Don't do it!!!!!!