I have talked a lot about music lately, and everyone seems to talk about music everywhere. Everyone knows of, or at least has heard of Pandora, a service that lets you create your own radio station surrounding a particular artist, and then the site recommends other artists that are similar in style and genre. You can favorite songs that you like, and ban artists and songs that you don't like. As you ad and favorite more content, Pandora begins to understand your music preferences based on given criteria. Other services offer similar content, but Pandora is the most popular out of all of them.
I myself like many other visually impaired people have found issues with Pandora because of its tendency to use flash a lot. Flash is a way to display content on a web page in a dynamic fashion. As a result, I myself, like other blind and visually impaired individuals, use Last FM, a competetor that offers to build personal radio stations like Pandora, along with the ability to search there music catalog by category, also known as searching by tag. I have received feedback that Pandora is accessible on mobile devices with the help of a screen reader, and both Pandora and Last FM are constantly adding new features. If you love Pandora, I would invite you to also check out Last Fm, where you can find links on artists' pages to music videos, concert information, and biographys to better get to know your favorite bands.
You can imagine these services as music search engines of course, more like recommendation engines that try to get to know you. Now you won't have to say "I wish they could understand my taste in music.", anymore ever again. If you know of any other streaming online radio services like Pandora, please let me know in the comments to share with others.
You bring up a excellent point that most of us would never think of or even know. There needs to be more websites that are geared towards the visualy impaired. I will for sure check out the Last fm, thanks for the suggestion! ♥Jessica
ReplyDelete