The low-down on downloads

Digital downloading is the fastest and cheapest way to access your favourite hits. But, as Cathy Reay found, it’s not that easy if you’re disabled

I love music. I eat it, sleep it, breathe it – and sometimes just listen to it. But over the past ten years the music industry has undergone a serious upheaval and the way we access new material has changed.

Independent record shops have closed down, and Virgin Megastores and Woolworths have stopped making money. The digital revolution is well under way and more and more people are turning to the internet to source music.

Online shopping is marketed as a stress-free alternative to regular shopping. But for disabled people that’s not always the case. Disability Now asked Julia Gosling, user interface developer at the web design company Fortune Cookie, to review the accessibility of the leading music e-stores.

The biggest brand name in music software is iTunes, so it came as a huge shock to us to discover that it’s the least accessible of the lot. Julia said: “Using a keyboard (with no mouse), I could bring the store onto the screen and search for a band but I couldn’t get
into it to preview any music or purchase anything. Navigating the application with a screen reader was confusing too; I wasn’t sure where I was at any one time.”

Spotify, an application that lets listeners stream (but not download) songs for free, is also inaccessible to screen-reader users, Julia said. The colour scheme of the menu is hard to read for people with impaired vision, but the keyboard shortcuts are easy to use.

Last.fm often features free downloads from artists of the day or week and streams songs through the website but the music that starts on each page as you open it is difficult to pause or stop, and it’s not possible to make the text bigger, Julia said.

In contrast, the online music store 7digital.com has a good, accessible range of text sizes. Like Last.fm, however, previewing music is difficult to navigate for screen-reader users, who have to return to the top of page to pause or stop it.

The cream of the crop was Amazon.co.uk. “You can get to all sections using the keyboard, and the music previewer is a toggle on and off, so it’s easy to use with a keyboard,” Julia said.

“It’s the most accessible of the lot, which says more about the inaccessibility of the other sites than the accessibility of this one!”

The inaccessibility of the leading legal music download brands is more than an inconvenience. With many it stops people accessing their main features. Let’s hope HMV has no plans to shut down anytime soon.