Just in time for Winamp's untimely demise, Spotify has
announced Spotiamp, a Spotify client for Windows built by one of its
engineers. It's "a small tribute to honour the great legacy of Winamp,"
the company says, and lets you play your music within the comfort of
everybody's favorite jukebox app.
- Source: The Verge
<http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/22/5235456/spotify-debuts-spotiamp-app-winamp-streaming>

Spotiamp Accessibility

Screen reader: NVDA (Next branch)

I extracted spotiamp.exe from the portable archive and ran it.  When you
first launch the app, the login dialog appears.  This is completely
accessible with labels for the two text fields (not that you'd need
them).  Your username and password (the latter encrypted) are stored in
your config file (spotiamp.ini); you are not given an option to change this.

Once you've successfully logged in, the Spotiamp main window is brought
into focus.  Screen and object view, as well as the NVDA OCR add-on,
fail to get anything useful from this screen.  According to the Spotiamp
website, there is also a button in the main window to access your own
Spotify playlists.  I haven't found a way to accessibly activate this yet.

There is a Winamp-style main menu, even if it is sloppily implemented.
To access it with NVDA, use object navigation to find the System menu
and right-click it.  This contains the program's limited list of
settings and reveals some hotkeys.  From this menu and my own
observations, here are the useful hotkeys that work in the program:
Ctrl+L - Switch Account
Ctrl+S - Search
Z/X/C/V/Space/Arrow keys - Same functions as in Winamp
Ctrl+P - Seems to hide (not toggle) the playlist view that opens when
you perform a search
Ctrl+V - Paste album/playlist/track URIs into the main window for playback

The search dialog is accessible.  It has tab auto-completion and thus
you can't navigate to the Search (default) and Cancel buttons.  These
have hotkeys, however.  The text which is filled in by auto-completion
is read when Tab is pressed.  Pasting Spotify track, album or artist
URIs into this dialog results in a blank playlist*.

*Update: You can paste URIs directly into the main window simply by
pressing Ctrl+V.  Pasting a track, album or playlist URI will play the
content straight away, while artist URIs don't trigger any apparent change.

The playlist view, as you would expect, displays the list of search
results.  Object navigation is again useless here.  Screen review sees a
list of partial track names and durations, but routing the mouse to one
and left/right clicking does nothing.  To start playback after
performing a search, press Enter.  It's probably best to close the
playlist view with Ctrl+P after doing this.

Some notes:
If you perform a new search while a track is playing, but don't press
enter in the playlist view, the results from that new search will be
queued anyway and your current playlist replaced.
Some hotkeys, as well as Alt+F4, do not work in the playlist view.
First letter navigation doesn't work in the playlist view either.

If you want to try Spotiamp for yourself or learn more about it, visit:
http://spotiamp.com/
-- 
James Scholes
http://twitter.com/JamesScholes

Reply via email to