Spotify focus issues with VoiceOver

By Aidan JK, 18 August, 2026

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hi everyone. I have reported the following issues to Spotify. Is anyone else having these issues?
1. when swiping right and left through an album, scrolling to a track and double tapping it does not always start the track playing. It sometimes requires locating the exact point on the screen where the track appears using a single finger, which is a much less easy way of navigating content. It's like the actual focus is not on the item that is being reported as current when swiping.
2. The above issue also occurs when swiping through 'liked' songs. It sometimes behaves normally, so that you can swipe right or left, double tap and the focussed track will start playing, but it frequently does not, and again requires exact location of the track on the screen to ensure play.
3. When swiping right through the episodes of a podcast, Spotify is repeatedly jumping back to the top of the list. The single finger workaround is even less easy with a podcast and multiple pages of episodes. This is because it isn't just failing to focus on the episode selected, but is jumping back to the top of the list. I am finding it impossible to navigate to anything beyond the latest episodes of a podcast without great difficulty.

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Comments

By Alicia Krage on Wednesday, August 19, 2026 - 00:23

I experience the same issue where songs won't play. This is even on my own playlists.

By al-Salil on Wednesday, August 19, 2026 - 08:20

I am experiencing the exact same issues in Spotify.
I find it especially annoying in podcasts as you also point out.
Back to Overcast and sometimes Apple podcast app for now.

By Urh Ε trakl on Wednesday, August 19, 2026 - 12:23

Thought it was only an iOS 27 issue but am glad I'm not the only one experiencing this. This is genuinely frustrating.

By Aidan JK on Saturday, September 19, 2026 - 08:15

For those who, like me, remain deeply frustrated by how unusable Spotify is becoming because of these problems, I have asked for an update. I have been assured that the accessibility team is working on it.
Spotify have been understanding and quick to respond throughout so I really hope we will get our fully accessible experience back soon. I'm missing my podcasts :)

By mr grieves on Saturday, September 19, 2026 - 12:44

Does Spotify have an accessibility team? Every time I've tried to email them I just automatically get a support request instead. I've had somewhat mixed results with Be My Eyes too. I have to say their support has been absolutely terrible most times. If you reply to a email you get a response in seconds that completely disregards everything you've said. I've always suspected that they get paid by the number of emails they send.

Admittedly I've not tried for a little while - it would have to be seriously broken for me to consider going through all that nonsense again.

I don't use the Spotify iOS app much but I did find that I was unable to find a way to actually play a track I had searched for the other day. It just always played the current song instead.

By Aidan JK on Sunday, September 20, 2026 - 00:56

It is Spotify Support staff that I have spoken to. I’m not in direct contact with an accessibility team but they told me such a team is working on it. It’s very common for a single support team to respond to customers, and escalate the query internally to the relevant teams. Apple is exceptional in having a dedicated accessibility team that nearly always answer.

I’m surprised to hear that about Be My Eyes. You’re definitely in the right place to post about them. I wonder if they are responding to emails with AI? I find that AI responses tend to disregard the specifics of what you have said.

By Vsevolod Popov on Sunday, September 20, 2026 - 08:14

Hi all,
I don't use Spotify every day but yes, I experience that too.
It is not that convinient to use explore by touch to navigate to songs to be able to play them, otherwise it seems like there is no even a double tap performed because there is no sound of it.
Did you email Spotify's support?

Ah ok - my experience with Spotify is - email accessibility, get reply from support that ignores my question altogether and tells me to do the things I've already told them I've done. I reply and point this out and then get the same sort of thing back. And around and around it goes. Eventually if I'm lucky someone tells me that screen readers aren't supported on the Mac version and then that's the end of that. (I've not contacted them about the iOS app before)

With Be My Eyes, the first time I got through to someone who was maybe not very knowledgeable about VoiceOver on the Mac but at least was enthusiastic and seemed eager to help. The second time I got through to someone who neither knew anything nor seemed to be that interested.

I seem to remember mentioning to the second person that the emails from support were hopeless because no one ever seems to read my emails and she said that she was one of those who replied. Which didn't make me feel very guilty at all.

Maybe it's different these days. I get very suspicious that a reply is AI if it just basically summarises what you've said back to you and then says that they are sending it onto the relevant people (aka recycle bin)

I noticed yesterday that I was surprisingly able to search for and play a song fairly easily. I then wanted to share it via WhatsApp and that proved pretty difficult. I managed it eventually with screen recognition - I thought I was clicking copy url but up popped WhatsApp which is actually what I wanted. Anyway it's not great.

I would be curious to know what this supposed accessibility team actually is as I don't get the impression that the likes of us come very high up on their list of priorities.