did spotify break accessibility on macos?

Yes the app crashes almost straight away for me. Was working fine a couple of days ago. The web player still works but is a bit fiddly.

I know if I contact support they will tell me to uninstall the app and reinstall because that is all they ever say. Have you tried this? I will probably give it a go but it's a bit of a hassle because you have to go through a few steps if I remember right.

The Spotify email support is absolutely awful. I am 99% sure it is automated because the replies come in so fast that they can't possibly have been written by a human. They also never pay the slightest attention to anything you say and just tell you to reinstall the app - even if you are just asking a question like "how do I do this?" the answer is still delete the app and start again. It is the absolute worst.

The only thing I have found is that if you ask for the issue to be escalated then you might get a reply from a human. I've only tried this once and did get through to someone who at least read my emails and told me that Spotify on the Mac didn't support VoiceOver. Because my issue was relatively minor I dropped it at that point.

The other option you have is to use Be My Eyes. I did get this and spoke to someone who was really enthusiastic and nice - however he knew absolutely nothing about screen readers and certainly not on the Mac.

I'm intending to reinstall the app today. But first I will ask mrs grieves to try without VoiceOver and see if I can confirm what you are saying that it is explicitly a VO issue. I hope not.

So I turned off VoiceOver, and mrs grieves was able to open Spotify fine. I asked her to go into settings and empty the cache. Bit of a long-shot and it didn't help.

But yes it does look like it is a problem with VoiceOver. If I turn off the option for the text and VO cursors to be synchronised and change start position of VO cursor to be first item in window, then I can get Spotify to open. But then as soon as I do anything it crashes again.

So I think it's either a case of braving support or hoping the next version will fix it.

I know this doesn't help but i was curious so tried it on my old Mac still running Ventura. It was on na ancient version of Spotify which still was working fine. So I upgraded it to see what would happen. And whilst it doesn't crash, the whole app is seemingly unusable. I can't seem to interact with anything. If I press Cmd+L it tells me I'm in the search box but I can't type anything. Anyway totally broken whichever way you look at it.

Are they different? Because I swear I downloaded the app, I have a spotify.app in the apps folder, but every time I run it it says "Spotify web player, music for everyone". It also works and doesn't crash though, so maybe I shouldn't wonder too much? Still though.

They are different, although the app is just a wrapper around a web app anyway. If it's a separate icon then it's either the real app or you created a Safari web app from the normal web player. If your main application bar has Spotify at the top, and also Playback then it's probably the full app.

It's possible you've not had the new version forced on you yet.

I know this is just going to end in tears but I sent an email to the accessibility email address. I doubt they will help but I will see if I can escalate it once the standard reply comes back. Otherwise will try to find the time for a Be My Eyes support call.

Unusually I had no reply from my accessibility email. Normally I immediately get the seemingly automatic reply from tech support. I'd like to think this is because they are considering their reply thoughtfully and fixing the app. But I'm guessing the email address doesn't work any more.

Has anyone managed to report this yet? I might try a Be My Eyes call but I'll need to set aside a few hours to do it.

Unfortunately, my friend is having the same issue as well. The exact same symptoms you described. To me, it looks like a bigger problem. I really hope I’m wrong, though. Personally, I use Apple Music, and I’d be upset too if I couldn’t use the app on one of the systems. After all, you don’t pay for a service just to find out it becomes inaccessible.

I sent an email to the accessibility address a week or so ago. Unlike normal I didn't get any reply. So today I finally got round to going through the whole uninstall process (deleting the various directories under Libraries, shutting down, waiting, restarting, reinstalling etc) And of course it didn't work.

So I then had an extremely frustrating Be My Eyes call with their support. They would ask me a question, I would tell them that it was useless - yes I have already restarted my Mac etc etc. Then they would go away for a few minutes, come back and say something like "have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling the app?" to which I coldly explained I had already told them up front and so off they went to spend a few more minutes googling the answer.

She did tell me that there was a post on the community forums about this. And yet her suggestion was that I submit VoiceOver support as a feature request. I came close to losing it at this point. I'm not sure she was understanding that VoiceOver was built-in and not a 3rd party service that needed to be supported.

Anyway she didn't; seem to have any power to pass this through as a bug to the developers. I asked if my call could be escalated to her manager. Instead she told me to email support@spotify.com. I may have had another little rant at this point. I said that I strongly suspected all the replies from the support email address were automated to which she replied she was one of those who answer the emails.

Anyway she promised to look out for my email so I have forwarded on my other one with some more details.

I am not going to hold my breath.

I've got to say, I love Be My Eyes, but out of the two people I have spoken to from Spotify through it, neither seemed to know anything about accessibility. At least the first guy tried to be helpful and saw the problem through my camera. This second person knew as much about accessibility but only seemed able of doing basic googling. And all the while in the background I could hear loud music and laughing. At one point her voice went quiet and I said I was struggling to hear her over the sounds of the party in the background, to which she apologised and sounded a little embarrassed.