flowkey – Learn Piano

Hi Tunmi,

Sorry for asking this but since, according to what I've read, the app relies on visuals and videos to teach songs and piano techniques, I'm wondering how a blind learner can take advantage of it. As such, apart from the layout of the app itself which you've found tolerable, can we use it for song lessons by just, say, listening to the audio provided? Are , the lessons anywhere similar to, for instance, Bill Brown's excellent Piano By Ear and Music By Ear courses? I use his lessons and songs to play the piano and absolutely love what he offers, but would very much like to try flowkey for more songs if the app actually works as recommended.
Thanks.

Hi,
I was exploring this app and I found it was not useful for me. It was hard for me to follow along with the video for one of the free songs.

I also use Bill Brown's Piano by Ear lessons. I find he explains each song well! I learn better when a song is taught in very detailed lessons and is broken down into smaller parts!

@JTran2013, I do agree with your findings regarding the flowkey app. Though I haven't used it myself, I was sure its graphic nature and video dependence would get in the way. Also I'm glad you come to like Bill Brown's piano lessons and courses -- I'm also a huge fan. Just wish we could get him to publish more song lessons for the piano or at least set up a mechanism for song requests even if they end up costing a bit more.

I have also requested a wide range of Richard Clayderman, Yann Tiersen, Yanni and John Lennon songs from him over the past couple of months.
BTW -- and at the risk of moving a tad off topic, I have found a piano teaching website whose owner, among other things, accepts requests to teach songs following a style which is quite similar to that of Bill Brown. His approach is video-oriented, but based on a couple of the full demo songs I've seen, it works for us, too. Furthermore, I also think if we ask him to alter his approach for the visually impaired, he will do that as we're essentially paying him to prepare the lessons. You may want to visit the following page for more information: Amosdoll's Full Song Video Lesson Options.
We can also discuss this privately if you wish.

Cheers,

Hello, I'm Geordie, one of the developers at flowkey. Thank you for all your feedback about using the app as blind or low-vision users.

Our developer team is small and constantly making improvements to the app in various ways. At this point I can't imagine we can introduce any accessibility-first major features in the near future, but I can imagine making improvements to how the current app works for blind and low-vision users.

With that in mind, I would love to hear what your experience is like if you follow our structured "Courses", which you'll find as a tab in the main menu. We cover quite a lot of material in the courses including how to sit at the piano, chords, improvising etc., as well as learning songs part by part with little visual interaction required. I suspect the main issue will be not being able to see which notes are lighting up on the keyboard during the exercises where you're supposed to play along. That is something we should be able to improve upon without breaking our development budget – my thought is to include accessibility labels for the note names that light up that include the note's octave.

I would love to hear from you all so we can plan any "low-hanging fruit" like this into our development schedule.

Kind Regards,
Geordie

Hello,

I can't figure out how to go to the next section when learning a song. I noticed there is a button at the end, after the horizontal progress bar, which loops a part of the song for us to learn, but I don't manage to go to the next section. Could someone explain this to me (if, of course, it is possible).
Thank you very much!
Regards,

Alexandra