Kestrell

I've been wanting to try Spotify for about a year, but accessibility reports kept giving Spotify completely negative reviews, and yesterday, when I attempted to download the program from the Spotify Web site, my screen reader crashed. However, recently Spotfy came out with a Facebook interface (there is also an iPhone app, which I've heard is accessible in the premium version). After much poking around, I tink it is possible to use the Spotify Facebook with some accessibility using Jaws, but it is still probably more for the adventurous user who doesn't mind exploring and trying out different things with Jaws.

This is what I did:
I went to the mobile Facebook site
m.facebook.com
and searched for the Spotify Facebook page, then read through some posts until I found a link to a playlist I thought looked interesting, The "Trick or Treat" Halloween playlist
http://open.spotify.com/user/spotifyusa/playlist/5a163KvEqXtkonbBJkp3xV
and clicked on the link to the playlist. The site prompted me to download Spotify, so I saved the program file on my computer, then clicked to install it using my Facebook username and password to log on to Spotify. However, this did require quite a bit of switching between the Jaws and the PC cursor. There was some other stuff to fill in, like your birthday, and also a checkbox which is checked int he default to share what you play on Spotify to Facebook. I admit, Alexx helped with this last bit, but I think it could be done without sighted assistance with some more trial and error.

So once I was logged on to Spotify, I went back to the Spotify Facebook page and clicked on the playlist title, then I used shift+tab in Jaws and hit enter, and the playlist began to play.

At some point, Spotify opens its own window, so there will be the two windows open, the Facebook page with the title of the playlist in the title bar and the Spotify window. There are some keyboard shortcuts which show up by using the alt key to bring up menus.
Hitting the spacebar toggles play and stop.
To go to the next track, press control+right arrow; to go back to the previous track, press control+left arrow (these commands are also available from the keyboard menus).
If you use your Jaws cursor, you can find the title and artist of the currently playing track, although Jaws will also speak this at some point.
At somepoint, there were a few different versions of Jaws scripts for Spotify, but all the links to those scripts are now strangely inactive.

It seems every time I get a handle on using Facebook, it radically changes its interface and I'm back to finding it mostly noise and chaos. However, because there are a few close friends of mine who only post to Facebook, I'm really hoping to get a grasp on finding some way to make it more manageable.

In order to do this, I have decided that I really need to reduce the number of folks on my Facebook friends list. I can reduce this list quite a bit by disconnecting from links which are associations and such, I think, but I will probably also end up unfriending some people who I feel I only tangentially know.

The purpose of this post is to stress that I don't wish for anyone to take this personally--I'm not unfriending anyone in real life, I just need to make Facebook more manageable if I am going to get any use out of it.

The people I am intending on keeping on my Facebook friends list are 1. people who are close friends, 2. people with whom I play Echo Bazaar regularly, and 3. a handful of writers and artists of whom I am a really big fan.

If you think that you may not be in one of these three categories but you would like to stay on my friends list so that you have access to my LiveJournal postings through Facebook, please send me a private message and I'll try to keep you on my Facebook friends list.