Blind developer here. I could never recommend VoiceOver on MacOS to anyone. 10 years ago before I lost my eyesight I was a huge fan of Apple - everything was just working so much smoother than in Windows world. And much more visually appealing. However, after losing eyesight, I had to switch to Windows. I learned VoiceOver on Mac at first, but working with it was so unbearably frustrating,, even back in 2016 when I was trying. Here are some of my complaints that I still remember:

* Many actions work every other time. I remember that interacting with text area of terminal app was especially painful since the sequence of commands was non-deterministic.

* Hierarchical navigation model is more cumbersome than flat navigation on Windows. In XCode to access some project settings you need to interact with some panel, which has two horizontal subpanels, so you need to interact with the right one, which in turn has two more vertical subpanels, you interact with the bottom one, which has three more subpanels... The recursion depth was 9 levels, I kid you not; and making a single mistake will lead you to wrong place.

* Searching webpage in a foreign language doesn't work. Because Command+F needs to be presssed in English layout and this would open VoiceOver search window, where switching to another layout doesn't work.

* No easy way to open a link in another tab in browser - as opposed to Control+Enter on Windows.

* Too difficult keystrokes - I remember one of keystrokes involved 5 keys: Fn+Ctrl+Option+Command+Up/Down. By now I forgot what it means, but I remember that it gave me plumber's disease - pain in my left wrist from having to press too many keys for extended periods of time.

I probably forgot a bunch more. Not sure if any of these have been fixed since then. But my general impression was that Apple is not very interested in fixing bugs, but instead, they appear to care a lot about presenting shiny keynote slides every year on WWDC claiming how much they care about accessibility.

In Windows world things are considerably better. Jaws is much more convenient to use, even though I've heard many reports of them not willing to fix bugs. NVDA is open source and it is my favorite, since if something doesn't work for me - I just go and fix it myself, but in general things are rarely broken to that extent in NVDA.

Also if I remember correctly Jaws and NVDA share about 45% of marketshare in the screenreader world, while VoiceOver is about 10%. So judging from this point alone anyone would be much better learning a Windows screenreader.

I have been a regular Mac user for over two years (MacBook Air M1) and the issue is far less severe than this person claims.

It used to be a much bigger problem around Mac OS 12, but even then, Cmd + option + q (quit and keep windows) would solve it pretty quickly.

Voice Over has a lot of issues, but so do Windows screen readers, and as a Mac user, I can at least decide to postpone an accessibility-breaking update, something which Windows doesn't let me do. Such an update was one of the main reasons why I switched OSes.

Not blind, I have no experience at all with any of this. However what I found quite impressive was witnessing an Apple Store employee guide a blind person through voice over. That to me implies that Apple at least trains some folks in the stores on accessibility features.

I was expecting some sort of systemic problem across the operating system, but it seems to be just one specific bug in WebKit—though there is also a link to “our recent post on problems in macOS Sonoma and the replies”, and though it does sound to be a rather debilitating bug for affected users, and though this sort of bug making it to production can be a symptom of systemic problems in the organisation.

This is an interesting take, and a very salacious headline.

I’m a lawyer who represent a number of disabled individuals (including the blind). My clients with vision impairments as all in on Apple products, saying that the accessibility features are head and shoulders above other options.

I am curious what he's going to recommend instead. AFAIK, Macs are the best out there (by quite some way) for accessibility.

There is a well known bug in the German TTS adding the Word „Homograph“ before and after each number for about a half year right now. It’s a shame for everyone who depends on that technology.

Non-sequitur to the article, but are there any good utilities for blind users to use on Linux?

From developer POV this is real frustrating. This seems like something that makes bad experience but at least in the post there are no reproducible steps. Also when a bug shows only sometimes, if it’s rare enough, sometimes it’s really hard to nail down. I guess Apple’s metrics are superior to mine. Yet, sometimes just catching an issue is tough.

The other complication with Apple is the fact that sometimes it might be needed for multiple teams to fix an issue (eg. WebKit, Safari and VoiceOver/Accessibility) so they all have their own apple ways which might not be trivial as a single team fixing an issue.

And least, yeah, it might just be prioritization as there are some bugs that are with us for years or even regressions between each OS iteration that stays forever.

Apple used to be great at developing good accessibility experiences, especially on their iPhones. (I personally cannot say much about accessibility on macOS as I rarely use it)

I think Google and Microsoft are catching up with Android and Windows respectively.

I was worried that making MacOS free with the purchase of Macs would lead to it withering on the vine and/or become a featureitis junkie.

Is that the case here? Not enough regular care and cage cleaning? This seems like a DEI class-action lawsuit nightmare in the making.

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I tried using a mac (2019 MBP, 8 GB RAM, 4 Thunderbolt ports) at work. I could create course material in Ulysses. I could manage files and folders with Finder. I could even slowly navigate through Moodle's stupid web interface. But then I had to start using Google Docs, and a Salesforce instance. Google Docs works reasonably well on Windows. I even gave a good enough of a bug report for the orca maintainer to make it more responsive on Linux with chrome. But Mac? I can't even begin to describe how messy it is. VoiceOver goes in and out of the document, the VoiceOver cursor gets stuck on menu items, that kind of messed up, where even if I want to download the document for offline usage, it's just... Frustrating enough for me to throw away the MacBook, not (entirely) literally, and grab the windows machine again.

Salesforce is slightly better except when you get to a table of record entries, that table is empty. Simply, nothing there. Luckily, I can use firefox to get around this. Or I can simply go back to windows and not have any of these problems. The web is snappy again, there is no freezing up or not responding or busy messages, nothing. It, amazingly for Windows, just works. And that's a shame for Apple.

I’m very sorry to hear about your experience. That really sucks. The fact we have a thriving browser ecosystem has got to count for something though. Could you recommend people use Firefox instead?

I have come to respect Apple in recent years for their focus on and promotion of accessibility within the industry. They are leading where others have often abrogated the responsibility to build inclusive products. We should celebrate this.

Therefore this headline made me sad. I appreciate sometimes drastic measures are required to persuade those with power to use it to change things, and it does sound like this bug has been around for too long. If Apple are serious about accessibility they need to fix it.

I have read that the relentless release cycle at Apple does lead to bugs like this never getting fixed. I hope this post gets upvoted enough that someone with influence sees it, and ensures that this one is different. Good luck!

I certainly don’t want to discount from the point this article is making, but as someone with a significant visual impairment, but that is not completely blind, I legitimately can’t imagine using anything that’s not macOS these days. This is coming from someone that grew up using Windows, and had an extensive Linux phase…including Gentoo.

Screen readers are a bit of a lightning rod for accessible technology interest, almost entirely because most people have some sort of sick curiosity. “How can someone use a computer so differently to the way that I do!?”. Of course, most of these people stop here, never bothering to try using a screen reader to navigate whatever they’re making. They might open VoiceOver, realise they don’t know how to intuitively use it, and fumble around with trying to close it again. This tends to have the effect of sucking any motivation out of the room. Most people won’t then go and meaningfully improve their screen reader experience, but they also won’t think to address any other accessibility shortcomings, especially visual ones, because “blind people use screen readers!” Is the pervasive meme.

This is part of why I am all in all so happy with how Apple has been going in this space lately. An obvious result of co-design / consultation, or dare I say it…hiring people with disabilities. Addressing accessibility concerns that the stereotypical SV techie has never even heard of.

Blog post from Applevis Subtitle: Why I Can No Longer Recommend a Mac to Fellow Blind Computer Users

I don't mean to editorialize, the title was just too long for the title box.

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If you're not coding, programming, a Mac is just expensive and overkill.