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iheart.com only showing mobile site

T

ted chittenden

When I got up this morning and tried to listen to an iheart.com station through one of the aggregation sites, instead of taking me to the Iheart desktop site, the site I was taken to was Iheart's mobile site. Thinking it was my browser (I've had trouble with iheart.com and Firefox before), I set about to clearing the cashes; deleting all of my cookies; uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox; updating and cleaning out my Windows 11 data, all to no avail. As a last resort, I started Microsoft Edge and tried loading the site from there (I've never had problems with iheart.com's desktop site with that browser) and the mobile site loaded in that browser as well.

I'm hoping this is just the team at iheart.com working on the site. If this is a permanent change, those operating the iheart.com site should know that the mobile website is not in compliance with the ADA as it includes buttons and graphics that are not labeled and that cannot be accessed using screenreading software. As a totally blind desktop computer user, I have absolutely no access now to radio stations on iheart.com other than by using direct streaming links provided by some aggregator sites (I won't name them) which IHeart prefers that people not use.
 
I use iHeart to listen to music at work regularly and am having no problem with it whatsoever. I am getting the normal site, including on browsers where the site shouldn't be cached.

iHeart did recently have a redesign that made the desktop site more like the mobile. I don't know about accessibility on the site or if it's compatible with screen readers, but, if you haven't logged in over the last few weeks, that might be what you're encountering.
 
Seconding what @Kent said. You said you were redirected from a third party aggregator. What happens if you went straight to the iHeart site to search for said station? These third party sites are not fully vested or trusted and as such the issue could also be completely on their end not having a proper link so the issue is not on iHeart's end but theirs.
 
Okay. I have found solutions to my issues with iheart.com and I'm going to post them here for anybody else on this Board who may have the same issues I do/did. Before I get into my solutions, let me say that I *did not* attempt to contact iheart.com as @Kent suggested; nor did I attempt to get in touch with a disability civil rights lawyer (as I was initially thinking). Any possible solution via the latter route would have taken too long and been too costly to be worth it. And the former? Since I could see no contact link on the site being shown to me, I thought that effort might be in vain as well. And I also didn't follow @lanceventa's advice about only accessing iheart.com stations directly from the main site. Frankly, I prefer using the aggregator sites and I thought it was not worth it to always go to the site's front page any time I wanted to hear an iheart.com station when my sighted friends and colleagues didn't have to do that (and really, that would have been a violation of the ADA if it had been the case since disabled access to public accommodations has to equal the access of the non-disabled per the text of the law).

So What did I do? Well, I went back through my aggregator of choice and selected an iheart.com station using Microsoft Edge. I then went through the station's page on the iheart.com line by line and found a "Play" button for that station (Hint: it wasn't the first "Play" button on the site.) I then used the various methods sites are supposed to use when putting the site into sections for the blind and disabled. Tables didn't work (they all went to preset buttons) and lists weren't set up. There were a couple of regions set up, but again, they were for the preset buttons. However, using the header markings, I was able to find the heading for the station and then arrowing down from there to find the "play" button for that station. The number of times I had to arrow down depended upon whether or not the station was a talk or music station--music stations included links to libraries and previous songs played that talk stations did not. One important note is that when arrowing down from the station headers, one comes to one or more buttons that say "Dismiss" on them. Do *not* press those--they will make the "play" button for the station disappear.

I then went back and did the same thing with Firefox, my browser of choice. However, when Firefox opened the station's iheart.com player, all it showed were the preset buttons. There were no headings, tables, regions, listings. And there wasn't even a button to play the chosen station. I did some experimenting and discovered that if I pressed shift+tab once, the site would look, and act, like what I found when using Microsoft Edge and I could use the same system I used with Microsoft Edge. Why the difference with Firefox, you may ask? Well, while I don't *know* the answer (I've never built a browser, let alone a website), my best guess is that the answer has something to do with how the browser caches the websites on which one clicks. Since I had cleaned out my Firefox caches completely last week, I highly doubted that cleaning them out again yesterday (when I performed these experiments) would have shown any different results.

So, for those of you who use this site, are totally blind, and wish to launch the iheart.com streams from aggregator websites that don't include the direct streaming links to play in your browser, this is how I'm listening to those streams now. While not a perfect solution, it is much better than the non-solution I was playing with before.
 
ted chittenden said:
Okay. I have found solutions to my issues with iheart.com and I'm going to post them here for anybody else on this Board who may have the same issues I do/did. Before I get into my solutions, let me say that I *did not* attempt to contact iheart.com as @Kent suggested;
Click to expand...

Just for the record, that wasn't me who suggested contacting iHeart; that was RadioFan2023. I mentioned a recent redesign of the desktop site and that I had no knowledge of whether or not the new version was accessible to screen readers.

Having said that, I'm glad you found a way to make it work for you. If you've ever worked in radio, even in the days before streaming, you never like to hear from people who want to listen but can't for whatever reason.
 


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