Accessibility Center

Spotify's Plan

Spotify, in consultation with Fable and persons with disabilities, has identified barriers under each of these headings and has outlined the strategies and mechanisms by which they plan to remove and prevent them below.

Employment

We are building a Spotify that reflects the diversity of the voices on our platform and the communities where we work and play. We're committed to promoting fairness, removing barriers, and fostering a culture where every bandmate can grow and succeed. Creating an accessible workplace is essential to empowering our people and driving Spotify's growth in a way that benefits all. When opportunities are accessible to everyone, we all benefit.

Where we are

Our commitment to building a Spotify for everyone is clearly stated, but we know there is still work to be done to improve our hiring process, accommodations process, and understanding of our employees with disabilities. We know that misunderstanding about disability exists and we want to reduce stigma and support our people managers to take the lead. We are proud of our global workplace accommodations philosophy and will continue to ensure all bandmates have the tools they need to do their best work. And finally, we are committed to ensuring candidates in our hiring process (both externally and internally) have more opportunities to request support.

Action plan

• Participate in the Disability Equality Index to benchmark our efforts.
• Identify an executive sponsor for our Disability & Neurodiversity Belonging Group.
• Improve the accessibility of our hiring process, including our external recruitment website, Life at Spotify, and our internal mobility platform.
• Continue to develop resources, programs, tools, and support for disabled and neurodivergent employees and managers.
• Collaborate with our community experience team to ensure all internal employee engagement events are accessible—track requests for accessibility at events to help with future planning.
• Audit internal HR systems and applications and make progress in ensuring accessibility for all employees.
• Review accommodations process to identify areas for improvement.

Build environment

At Spotify, employees can choose to work where they work best—whether that's at home, at the office, or at times, somewhere else entirely. When they choose to work from our offices, we work hard to provide accessible spaces for everyone. We know how important workspace accessibility is—if lighting can't be adjusted independently for a person's workspace or there isn't a scent-free policy, this can cause pain, breathing difficulties, or sensory overload, making it difficult or impossible to focus on work tasks.

Where we are

Our office design principles, which dictate Spotify's global office design and layout, include a commitment to accessibility. We also follow market regulations to ensure we meet current standards of accessibility. We offer periodic ergonomic consults for all employees as well as reasonable accommodations, like adjustable-height workstations or other ergonomic accessories, as needed.

It has always been our goal to ensure that our spaces meet a robust definition of "accessible", and design our spaces in a way that removes any current barriers, including at walkways and waiting areas. Still, people occasionally experience barriers when they visit Spotify's offices, such as doors without automatic opening sensors. And while we have clear accessibility guidelines today, implementation of those guidelines remains inconsistent across our spaces.

Action plan

• Communicate with employees about the variety of spaces and accommodations available to them, like Focus Areas and Presentation Pods.
• Update our accessibility guidelines and adopt them for all new projects.
• Audit our guidelines to address gaps and address them in an update.
• Provide accessibility training for our Global Workplace Services team.

Information and communication technologies (ICT)

The focus of this section is the people and technology we use to provide support. We want the experience of getting support from Spotify to be as intuitive and accessible as our products. We encourage people to identify any accessibility needs that haven't been met on our platform, and to communicate with us through our feedback process. For this report, we have reviewed all existing feedback, and have attempted to remediate issues that have been brought to our attention.

Where we are

For Customer Service ("CS") Advisors at Spotify, accessibility training is required. We offer a specific channel for accessibility feedback and are proud to partner with Be My Eyes (BME) to connect blind and low-vision people with our team for help. We've also partnered with Spotify's internal Accessibility team to audit our written content for clarity, vocabulary, and formatting. However, some of the software we use to provide customer support could still be made more accessible, particularly when the software was not built using Spotify's design system, which generally guarantees accessibility features like text resizing and proper color contrast. Our training could also be improved and extended to all teams in our support ecosystem.

Action plan

Over the next three years, we aim to firmly establish a culture of accessibility within the Customer Service team.

• Build a team within our team with the specialized knowledge, skills, and tools to support people with disabilities.
• Coach all teams to provide a high level of support to users with disabilities.
• Resolve existing issues and improve our Customer Service platform, self-serve surfaces, and bot experiences to improve their accessibility.
• Establish a process to continuously review and improve external-facing customer service tools.
• Resolve existing issues and improve the accessibility of our internal operator tools.
• Establish a process to continuously review and improve external facing internal operator tools.
• Build out our performance management framework to better cover accessibility-related interactions.
• Maintain and review our authorship philosophy to reflect accessible writing standards (as defined by Spotify's design system) and publish content that meets a range of customer needs and learning styles.
• Continuously monitor and improve based on customer feedback and regular auditing.

Communication, other than ICT

This includes internal and external communications from Spotify, led by teams including brand, communications, and partnerships. Our employees hear from us via internal written and live channels, whereas people outside the company might see us in Out Of Home (OOH) marketing spaces or on their social media feeds.

Where we are

We strive for accessible content across all of our communications and are committed to the ongoing assessment and improvement of standards. This Plan represents a drive towards increased maturity in our practices for outputs.

Action plan

• Adopt and standardize accessible formats and communications across online experiences like our newsroom or social media channels.
• Structure best practices for internal and external images, assets, and presentations.
• Build a system for employees to share feedback internally on assets.
• Audit marketing assets and resources to identify any potential improvements or helpful resources we could add.
• Work with regions to ensure all social media channels have enabled auto-generated captions and other in-platform accessibility features.
• Consult with Fable to assess our existing standards for experiential marketing and plan for additional measures.
• Send pre-arrival communications to invitees for in-person experiences to prevent potential discomfort (e.g., "this event will feature a performance that includes flashing lights").

Procurement of goods, services, and facilities

At Spotify, procurement includes things like software and cloud infrastructure, as well as office supplies, professional and corporate services, marketing and much more. This massive scope includes a four phase process of intake, assessment, negotiation, and finalization. We aim to incorporate accessibility into our process.

Where we are

As a procurement team, we've assessed our current state and found that our Spotify for Vendors website does not mention our stance on accessibility. In addition, we do not currently incorporate accessibility as an element of consideration when sourcing and onboarding vendors.

Action plan

• Prioritize updating the Spotify for Vendors website with our accessibility statement, which will support internal and external socialization of the policy.
• Assess key strategic vendors in relevant spend categories to evaluate accessibility considerations.
• Develop a plan to incorporate accessibility questions into existing request for proposal (RFP) process and vendor onboarding process for in-scope categories.

Design and delivery of programs and services

This section includes how we train designers, engineers, and everyone responsible for building Spotify products, our approach to building accessible products, and the design practices we use to make them as accessible as possible for all kinds of users.

We've broken this significant category down into four sections:

1. Training and documentation
2. Team
3. Audits, research, and analysis
4. Process

This category has shared ownership across Spotify's dedicated training, accessibility, and design teams.

Where we are

Training, accessibility, design systems, and leadership teams work to help build accessible products, but have room for improvement. When our digital products and tools aren't tested by people with disabilities, they could be difficult to use, causing employees to work slower or customers to switch to another service that is easier to use. And if employees don’t have adequate training, this can lead to lower retention and promotion rates for employees with disabilities or poor customer service experiences for customers with disabilities.

Training and documentation

• We hold accessibility courses and practical sessions.
• We offer eLearning modules from Fable, including: Intro to Digital Accessibility, Accessible User Experience, Testing Accessibility, Accessible Web Development, Accessible Mobile Apps for iOS, and Accessible Mobile Apps for Android.
• We track completion rates for the modules on our online learning platform, Greenhouse.
• We lack dashboards and comprehensive metrics about the accessibility program.
• There is room for improvement for accessibility for internal Spotify platforms and products used by employees.
• We have extensive documentation, activities, and resources on accessibility for all audiences, but there's always room for more organization, clarity, and proactive internal marketing.

Team

• We reward teams and individuals who prioritize accessibility.
• We have relationships with several accessibility vendors, including, but not limited to Fable.
• We have a dedicated team of Accessibility Engineers, an Engineering Manager, and a Program Manager.
• Product teams don't have anyone specifically responsible for accessibility.

Accessibility audits, research, and analysis

• There is a process to request an accessibility audit, as well as existing audits.
• We make all user tests and research studies available for everyone at Spotify.
• Our pre-launch testing has a limited scope which doesn't include assistive technology users.

Process

• Our design system delivers accessible color themes, type scales, components, and layouts.
• Accessible design and writing guidelines are published on our design system website.
• Design teams don't always have the expertise to prioritize the highest levels of accessibility, and balance competing design considerations.
• Our approach to creating accessible products can be reactive, often due to competing priorities, meaning we address accessibility gaps after launch.

Action plan

Training and documentation

• Advocate for all Research and Development employees to complete accessibility training.
• Update courses to make them more applicable to specific product areas.
• Encourage people to complete in-depth, role-specific training.
• Develop a do-it-yourself accessibility kit for teams to train themselves.
• Develop and schedule a communications plan for existing courses to increase internal awareness.
• Review the program's outcomes and gather feedback to identify areas for improvement. Adjust the program as needed for future iterations.
• Provide the insights team with key metrics from training, including enrollment and feedback data and improve training content and availability from this data.

Team

• Create our internal accessibility champions network and encourage them to influence the business to retain accessibility as a first-class citizen alongside other non-functional requirements.
• Grow our internal accessibility champions network and continue to advocate for accessibility.
• Fold our mature internal accessibility champions network into a more formal career development framework at Spotify, for example, demonstrated proactivity in accessibility work as one new prerequisite in Spotify's career framework.

Accessibility audits, research, and analysis

• Continually assess the state of accessibility at Spotify with regular audits, including people with disabilities, and keep track of response times to reduce time between problem discovery and resolution.
• Uphold accessibility standards with creative product branding.
• Use data-driven analysis and storytelling to keep track of accessibility work and offer cross-org commendations for proactive work.
• Audit Spotify microsites and websites.
• Expand audit and accessibility scope to internal products.

Process

• For the product discovery stage:
  • Map all primary points of design, product, and software development lifecycles that could benefit from appropriate tooling, testing infrastructure, and automation.
  • Build/integrate appropriate tooling, testing infrastructure, and automation into relevant sections of our design, product, and software development workflows.
• Iteration and maintenance stage:
  • Invest in the appropriate tooling, testing infrastructure, and automation to allow us to shift accessibility thinking earlier into the product development lifecycle.
  • Introduce workflows for Spotify employees to independently contribute revisions to relevant accessibility content.
• Rolling support for fixing issues as they arise.
• Uphold accessibility standards with creative product branding.