Is it just me, or is Accessibility of the Audible iPhone app severely regressing?

My biggest complaint, and I have passed my concern to the Audible hotline is primarily with the Library view. I've also reported the difficulty of taking advantage of their Daily Deals. However, once I have a book going, things go pretty well.

Audible is almost unusable for me, searching for books and moving around the library are pretty much no goes. I have almost 1500 books so you can imagine how much money I’ve spent with audible and how I feel about this especially considering how little we have full equal access to, books through audible was meant to be something we get without frustration but apparently amazon disagree. Its strange, in another thread on iOS 16 I had written yesterday that I was having a pretty good time with accessibility but after thinking about it I realised what had actually happened is I do a less diverse set of things on my phone because so many accessibility issues exist in safari, news, YouTube, audible, books, podcasts amazon and on and on. What’s happened is my breadth of things I can be bothered to try has compressed. The worst of it is how few websites I use because so often it ends up in upset. Anyway, back to audible. Basically the only place I don’t really have problems is the now playing screen. Years ago, maybe 10 or so. I spent hours on the phone with various people at Audible until I ended up with a very helpful guy in high level management, he seemed committed to providing a good experience with accessibility, it was around the time they implemented /access for a better accessibility experience. I would have preferred not to have been split off into a basic environment away from other users but at least they were trying to make audible an accessible place. I just bought a windows laptop after years of being Apple only and downloaded audible on that but it seems completely inaccessible in the 5 minutes I bothered to use it.

Sad that accessibility is not an important for thing for them. I have 904 audiobooks and search is a pain, moving to the next book is a headache.

I honestly don't use audible that much I mostly use Bard, but one particularly annoying issue I've found is that sometimes, when I listen to an audible audiobook with VO and headphones sound will go away when I lock the screen but it won't actually stop it's more like no sound will come through, and when I turn on my device it will start again but in the place it would be if I had been listening to it. I can disconnect my headphones, close out of the audible app and reconnect them... or I could just turn VO off and on. This is super weird and it only happens sometimes. Has anybody experienced this?

Guys, I have no real issues navigating the library tab. Have you double checked that you're navigation style is set to flat and not group? I've found if set to group VO tends to only read a certain number of elements then jumps back to the top. Navigation style is found under settings and VoiceOver. Make sure it is set to flat. May help.

I haven’t found much advantage yet to using group navigation so I mostly stay on flat. I think the problem is it seems like they use a kind of tile view. I think it was in a list style, maybe they could give list view as an option? I don’t think that would resolve all the issues as focus seems to jump all over the place especially when using the search function but it may at least mean VO is navigating a list of the same item type. It’s completely unusable for me unless I want one of the first 3 items and don’t navigate lower than them before selecting one. Also they need to sort out grouping of books, as an example books in my library and from other sources, VO can’t move between those at all, swiping or touch navigation doesn’t matter.

Edit: I haven't experienced the disappearing book audio in headphones bug.

I too have a large library and have noticed this for at least a year now, far longer I'd venture to say. This VoiceOver scrolling but not actually focusing seems to be somewhat of an issue in any app that has lots of items on a screen for me, so this might not actually be as specific to Audible as it may appear, but I'd be interested in what others have to say about this.

I also have the library issue. One thing that might be a workaround is scrolling manually with 3 fingers, then browsing by touch, but that's super annoying to do long term.

Best
Malthe

I Haven't used Audible for some time but decided a few moments ago to check the app having read comments here and then linked this discussion to Audible for their attention.

ideas@audible.co.uk

Good plan but for me at least the entire library just disappears when I try to do this. Like theres nothing in the main window of the phone and only the tabs at the bottom and search etc at the top. It’s literally unusable unless I can remember the name of a book and search for it. It’s completely unacceptable after spending many many many thousands of pounds on books but like so much with issues that affect small numbers of people, they just get lost in the noise. Especially at the moment when so many are angry about so much. IMHO.

No issues here; I just added about 5 courses to my list. the audable app is perfect for me and accessibility wise I think it's actually getting better.

Certain sections, such as "Tell us what you like about [book name]" are not labeled as headings but have unlabeled headings next to them. I don't see the point of leaving the heading blank when you have a perfectly good title right next to it, and it makes navigating by heading basically useless because you have to swipe again to find said perfectly good title, or, even worse, just swipe around and try to figure out what the heading is supposed to mean because there is no title.

Hi, that sounds great. Is open audible on windows and does it preserve chapters etc? Thanks.

Wow, thats really interesting. Do you have a large library? I wonder what could be different?

I have over 800 books in my library and experience the same navigation issues described here by others when scrolling through the long list of books in the entire library. However, as mentioned, I've encountered this issue in other apps where long lists are displayed. I think it's a function of paging the lists on multiple screens and may be something handled by Apple. So, I make use of the filters. If I've downloaded the book, I choose that filter. If I'm looking for a new book to read, I choose the "not started" filter, etc. It's only the scrolling that's a problem for me. Everything else is perfectly accessible.

I prefer the Audible app for listening to audiobooks over all other apps because it works well with my airPods. I have the left airPod configured to skip back and the right airPod for play/pause. If I double-tap the left airPod, playback skips back 30 seconds -- just the way I want it to work. I can leave my phone locked, sitting on the table beside me, and never have to touch it while I'm listening to an Audible book. Neither Voice Dream Reader nor the BARD app work with my airPods, so I must keep the phone unlocked and the app open in order to navigate the book while listening to it.

BTW, the Audible website is very accessible, so if I just want to scroll through my library, I use the website.

OK. Me to.

Yes the filters are a good idea, and although I have a pretty small library and don't have the need to scroll I use this a lot because I find the library view somewhat confusing.