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I originally asked this on StackOverflow, but was told it wasn't appropriate for SO and was told to ask it here instead see original question. If it's still not in the right place, I apologise.

As a blind music fan, I've always wanted an accessible version of Spotify. The desktop offerings for Spotify have lacked a little (to put it charitably) in terms of accessibility. A while back, I wondered if I could hook into an API and write my own accessible front end to Spotify to aleviate this, but couldn't find anything. Recently, though, someone pointed me in the direction of Libspotify, and now I'm planning on using it.

I guess I have a few questions before I start my project that I hope you'll be able to help me with. I have read the readme but I still want to know a couple of things.

Firstly, has this already been done? I've been power-googling away and have found no accessibility boasting or focused desktop clients to date.

Second, are there any hidden rules about house-styles, etc? It's entirely possible I may go for a windowless interface, similar to another accessibility-focused app, The Qube, though I'm twoing and throwing about that one. I'm interested to know how this will effect it. I've read the readme and it points me to a small text file that I should include somewhere in the app, which is fair enough. Anything else?

Finally, are there any pitfalls I should consider?

I know there are blind people that share my desire to have access to Spotify, I think this is best illustrated by half an episode on BBC Radio 4's blindness related podcast In Touch read full transcript. This seems like a wortwhile project to me, but if it's doomed from the start, I'd rather find out now.

Thank you for your time and I hope this isn't too wordy an intro to my problem.

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    I like that you are willing to scratch your own itch and help others in the process. Making this a comment and not an answer as I have zero experience with the subject, just an observation. A windowless interface would be fine if you target your app at other blind people. If you are thinking of targetting a broader audience, then a windowed interface would certainly help its acceptance. But if I were you I'd concentrate on the windowless one. It makes for good UI - logic separation. And it should then be relatively easy to add the UI later.
    – Marjan Venema
    Jun 14, 2013 at 9:34
  • You're not alone, i've wanted another GUI for Spotify for long. I'd be right on it if i actually new how to code in C. They pretty much screwed us over with the last update as well.
    – qwerty
    May 12, 2014 at 14:12

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The API (Libspotify) is there for exactly this reason: allow third parties to develop apps that do things the Spotify team can't or won't be able to realize with the main app. Apparantly they don't have accessibility for the blind high on their priority lists, or perhaps they don't have the resources to do anything about it properly. The best way to do something about this would be to solve the problem and get attention.

Dig into their terms and condition to find out if there are any requirements. As far as I can see they say that if you have a UI you need to have one of their logo's in there. Which to me means not having a UI would also be fine.

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  • This answer mostly confirms what I'd sumised, but yes I think you're right. Thanks for your help
    – Craig Brett
    Jun 27, 2013 at 18:13

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