Revision History
7 May, added a new section to the top of the post describing dialogue I have had with Sonos and a statement they have issued.
7 May, added a section featuring responses from Sonos.
6 May. Revised the section on disabling automatic updates to cover how to do this specifically for Sonos on Android. Thanks Ed Green for the clear instructions.
Update, 7 May 2024
I have been having some constructive dialogue today with a senior representative of Sonos, and I appreciate it.
Sonos have now posted this update on their community. I am linking to it directly so you can post your own comments and questions there if you would like to, and perhaps Sonos will continue to report progress.
My conversations with Sonos today have led me to believe that they accept that the findings of the tester who reported regressions are accurate. Sonos say they will have these issues addressed on 21 May, with further enhancements rolling out over time.
It is encouraging that blind users are not being ignored, and events of recent days have made it very clear to Sonos that blind Sonos users will not tolerate second-class treatment. However, it is still in my view a regrettable error of judgement that Sonos does not consider it important that the accessibility experience be equal in quality to that of the present app on day one.
In my accessibility advocacy, I frequently refer to the concept of equivalency. In other words, if an equivalent user experience were being offered to sighted people, would that be acceptable? Would it even be released?
Based on the tester’s description, I am certain that the answer is “no”. If an equivalent user experience from an accessibility perspective wasn’t ready at release time, then the app wasn’t ready for release to anyone.
It is also disappointing to read reference to the Sonos Mac app in their update, since my Mac-using friends tell me this is nowhere near as good an experience for blind users as it is on the PC.
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 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.
Responses from Sonos
`,Since I published the first version of this post on 4 May 2024, some blind customers, leaders in the blind community, and people with a professional interest in accessibility have contacted Sonos seeking assurances that proper accessibility testing has been done and that the app will not represent a regression for blind users.
The more I read, the more concerned I am that a fairly cursory check has been made by simply opening up the app and flick through the elements, with little understanding of what a good accessibility experience should feel like.
On the Sonos Community, this thread was started shortly after the new app was announced. A Sonos staff member stated that the app had been tested with VoiceOver, but did not say if this had been an internal test by sighted people or whether blind testers have confirmed the quality of the user experience.
In response to mounting concerns, the same Sonos staff member responded,
“I cannot comment on Beta software, and technically, neither can anyone else – Non-Disclosure Agreements are in place! Beta is Beta, however, and it is unfair to judge any software by it’s pre-release version.”
Of course it is true that software improves over time, that is the purpose of beta testing. If that is what happened, surely given the mounting concern Sonos could simply tell us that, that they got off to a rough start but they have made the app much better now.
I responded in the community by saying in part,
“What we know is that in all Sonos’s official communications on the new app, no mention was made of accessibility. Blind people had to come to this community, to Reddit, and to social media to ask the question. After doing so, there was quite a delay until Sonos provided an answer, meaning that accessibility isn’t exactly top-of-mind during this creation process.
Next, we have a user who, yes, while probably breaching NDA, felt so overwhelmed by the user experience for VoiceOver users with the iOS app that he didn’t know where to begin reporting the issues.
Whistle blowing is a perfectly reasonable response when a vulnerable part of the userbase may be adversely affected.
You can of course play the NDA card, but here’s the thing. App updates at least on iOS are a one-way trip. I suspect our Android friends are far better off in this regard and can get the old app back if they need to, unless subsequent Sonos firmware updates require the use of the new app.
I note the NDA card wasn’t played when Sonos produced YouTube videos showing people the new app. If that’s acceptable for sighted people, why isn’t something equivalent acceptable for blind people? If Sonos really has this under control, why not have a capable screen reader user demonstrate that the app has in fact substantially improved since that tester had such an overwhelming, disheartening experience?
Sonos appears so disconnected from the blind community that it doesn’t seem to understand what is happening! I know firsthand that a Government regulator in the United States has already expressed concern to the CEO, as has the leader of the largest consumer representative organisation in the United States, a similar organisation in Europe, a leader in Canada, and individual customers who just want their products to keep working with the same high degree of accessibility that exists now.
So the NDA card is not the right one to play here. At best, Sonos has seriously mishandled quality communication with its blind customers, having not factored accessibility into the comms strategy around the app. At worst, if the released build of the app is as bad as the one this tester used, things are going to get really rocky.”
Here is one of many customer emails that has been sent to Sonos and has been forwarded to me by the sender. It’s courteous and clear.
”
Hello,
I understand that a re-designed app for both iOS and Windows is scheduled to be released very soon and have been hearing unsettling rumours about its accessibility to visually impaired users using either VoiceOver on iOS or a similar screenreader under Windows. The rumours say that, in fact, the app is, at the very best, incredibly flaky and inefficient for screenreader users and, at worst, totally unusable due to its inadequacies.
As a Sonos user for around eight years now, I’ve always been impressed by the level of accessibility in both platforms and am, therefore, dismayed to learn that this situation may well be changing. I have invested thousands of pounds in my speakers and, currently, have 10 scattered around the house with the prospect of them all becoming redundant if the app accessibility is as bad as being reported.
Can you assure me, please, that accessibility testing by a totally blind screenreader user has been carried out and that the app is, in fact, fully accessible and, just as important, usable?
If there are any doubts as to its accessibility, I would hope that its launch will be delayed until it is fit for purpose. If, for some reason, it can’t be delayed, can you assure me that we will not be forced to upgrade to the new environment but can continue using the current version until such time as the new app is made fully accessible.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Regards from a worried, totally blind user.”
He eventually received the following response.
“We appreciate the attention given to accessibility concerns when managing the Sonos system. We are committed to improving the new Sonos app, aiming to deliver a more reliable and enhanced experience compared to what the S2 app currently offers.
Support for accessibility controls for the visually impaired is a high priority for Sonos. We are pleased to announce that VoiceOver is integrated into our app experience for iOS users, and TalkBack is available for Android users.
While features may not be fully polished yet, we are dedicated to swiftly addressing any shortcomings when our customers reach our support to report their findings. Sonos aims to improve functionality for a smooth and effortless user experience, this includes blind and visually impaired customers.
You also have the option to turn off automatic updates, so you can decide for yourself when to update to the new version, in case you feel more comfortable waiting a bit.
Should you have any further questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reply to this message.”
So, no direct answer to the key question about their testing methodology. We just don’t know on what basis they are saying this app is OK, when it has been said by screen reader users that it is not.
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.
iOS
You’ll want to disable automatic app updates. Unfortunately, the only way to do so on iOS is to disable all of them. 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.
Android
If you’re using Android, the good news is that you can disable just the Sonos app from updating automatically. To do this, locate the Play Store entry for the app whose auto updates you want to disable (in this case Sonos), double tap the More Options button (represented visually as 3 dots) in the top right hand corner of your screen, and uncheck the Enable auto updates check box by double tapping it.
If you want to turn off auto updates for all apps, go into play Store, double tap on the button in the top right hand corner of your screen which lets you know which account you’re signed into, double tap on Settings, double tap on Network Preferences, Double tap on Auto update apps and double tap on the radio button labelled Don’t auto update apps.
Sonos itself
For the moment, there is a second thing that I would suggest doing, and a representative of Sonos has confirmed for me that this is the best way to keep your system in its current fully accessible state. However, please keep in mind that if you add new devices to your system, you will have to update your Sonos firmware.
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.