Spotify announces Podcast transcriptions, other new accessibility features

Spotify has today announced it is rolling out some big accessibility changes to its platform in the coming weeks.

In a blog post the company stated:

Spotify is part of the lives of over 356 million people around the world—and we're cognizant that many of our users have different access needs. We're continuously making accessibility improvements to the experience to help many of our users enjoy the songs and podcasts they love more easily. So today, we're introducing three updates to Spotify on iOS and Android: buttons with increased readability features, options for text resizing, and a beta for podcast transcripts.

The changes will bring new buttons with different colors, text formatting, and sizes that will make it easier for low-vision and visually impaired users to "spot and engage with these actions when using Spotify on their phones".

It is also introducing a larger text size available in the Settings of iOS that will let users increase the font size of the app.

The final and arguably biggest change is podcast transcripts:

In the coming weeks, we're also introducing auto-generated podcast transcripts. This is a limited beta for select Spotify Original and Exclusive podcasts across iOS and Android. The new feature will automatically generate transcripts for these shows, allowing users to read the text of the specific podcasts on their phones either with or without sound. Users will also be able to quickly scroll and navigate through specific episodes and click on any written paragraph to start playing from that point.

You can read the full announcement here.