Why I can no longer recommend a Mac to fellow blind computer users
applevis.com
applevis.com
* 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.
What the actual fuck. This is ridiculous if you are blind and otherwise abled. Now imagine what it’s like if you have incomplete control over your fingers, or tremors, etc. At that point it’s simply impossible. Apple, with all those billions in the bank, maybe you could spend a few million getting these problems right.
There's also the "numpad commander" for external keyboards with a number pad. I like this; you navigate with the 4 and 6 keys, 4 moves back and item, 6 moves forward, and there are keys to skip to the next heading and such. Of course, for hand tremors, I'd really hope one day Apple's voice control and VoiceOver work well together. Right now, it's kinda harder to do if you don't know the name of controls to click on before you get to them with VoiceOver, or if you don't have headphones, the voice output will interfere with the voice input.
yes, you could say the same about their sustainability /environment/ (and arguably /privacy/). it's more about marketing and owning the narrative than it is about actual substance imo.
I mean it's amazing that blind people can use such a portable device; but I don't quite like that there are only so few gestures that can be made using touch screen. That's the reason they had to invent rotor, I personally find it inconenient compared to using a full size keyboard; but given touch screen rotor is probably the best you can get out of it.
But also I need to mention again my complaints about bugs that never get fixed. Just in case someone from Apple is reading this:
* In some apps the focus jumps about 1 second after opening a new screen. This is especially bad in YouTube app, but also can be rreproduced in other apps albeit with lower delay.
* Back in the days when iPhones had a physical home button, tripple press was supposed to toggle VoiceOver. But the problem is that in more than half iPhones (mine and friends') it stops working after a few weeks of usage. Yeah it can be argued that it's hard to reproduce, but this bug was so well-known and infamous in blind community that shame on Apple for not fixing this.
In general I'd think that a smart decision would be to make both iOS and MacOS VoiceOvers open-source, so that blind people themselves can fix all the bugs. Until then we're left with the situation that a bunch of disinterested sighted devs work on VoiceOvers, and as I already mentioned they are more interested in implementing some shiny new features instead of fixing decade old bugs. And as far as I know being an accessibility engineer is kind of considered one of the worst in the pecking order of engineers, so only those people who couldn't find a better career become accessiblity engs. engs.
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.
I would love to believe it was due to my excoriating writeup of the experience a decade ago:
https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/18605.html
That was just shockingly bad treatment, in our opinions (categorically not humble.)
> I want to emphasise that the “Safari not responding” bug is far from the only issue effecting VoiceOver users on Mac. As our recent post on problems in macOS Sonoma and the replies outline, there are numerous other VoiceOver frustrations and failures impacting users.
As a web developer who is committed to supporting blind and disabled users in general, I'm just getting deep into all of this now, and so far I can say that VO is the worst of the three screen readers for web usage. It has fallen far behind on standards support for modern aria attributes, completely ignoring many of them in practice, to the point where it's not possible to always achieve intended screen reader behaviour in VO.
Much as with Safari, Apple only seems to pays lip service to support of VO, completely blind users seem to only ever use VO if given no other option, but many online stats muddy OS usage with web usage to make this less obvious.
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.
Because I have cataracts, it helps to make everything on the screen bigger. MacOS can do it, but the result is blurry unless the scaling factor is exactly 1 or exactly 2, and choosing 2 reduces the horizontal resolution too much for some web sites. (My monitor is 1080p, so with a scaling factor of 2, the viewport is only 960 pixels wide.)
In contrast, Linux/Wayland offers scaling factors 1.0, 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, 2.0 and 2.25. (I've been using 1.75 for months.) Windows works similarly to Linux/Wayland (though apps that have not been updated to work with recent versions of the OS end up blurry), so MacOS is definitely a laggard here.
(Also, it hasn't been called Control Panel for 20 years.)
I can’t relate. I’ve been using a scaling factor of 1.5 for about a decade now (4K monitor scaled to 2560x1440) and it’s never blurry.
(You could ask me why if I hate blurriness so much, why am I still using a 1080p monitor. My answer is my high-DPI monitor is coming soon.)
Also, this is talking about voiceover on Mac OS, which is a specific aspect of apple's accessibility solutions. For the most part, IOS on iPhone and iPad OS are better than that of android, though not without their issues. The issue at hand, however, is very real and, for professionals, highly inconvenient.
There’s something to be said about having a well-known system, as it cultivates a great deal of “tribal knowledge,” and that can be invaluable.
That said, I think that we train ourselves on whatever platform we use. Both Windows and Mac have fairly comprehensive support for Accessibility. I think Apple is newer to the game, but the granularity of the options in the latest OSes is pretty crazy. Not just for blind folks; but for all kinds of disabilities. I’m confident that Apple takes accessibility very seriously.
I like to leverage accessibility and localization in my programming.
I think Apple gets too much of a pass for being serious and commited, where other players have actual results.
On mild level accessibility, the part that surprised me the most was keyboard mapping. While macos got caps lock/esc/ctl remapping as touted out improvement, there is no blessed way to remap the rest of the keys.
That means third party deamons like Karabiner are the only straight option, and since it stopped being a kernel extension it's also out of the critical loops and will lag under load. In the worst moment I see keystrokes getting processed with enough lag to miss the combined triggers or go to different applications.
Windows has more options out of the box (e.g. 106 key layouts IME languages etc.), Powertoys is blessed and efficient, and AutoHotKey works well even under stress.
I'm still hoping for more improvement on macos land, but I wish there was less talk and more work on Apple's part.
This (again my limited understanding) is why AutoHotKey has not been successfully ported to Mac, because it is either not technically possible to achieve or time required would make it not worthwhile.
For instance I need the Left and Right Command keys to each switch on/off the IME when single pressed, and act as Command when combined with other keys. Same way the Fn key doesn't seem to be mappable.
Seems to work at the same level as the Powertoys remapper on windows, minus the shortcuts.
JAWS is often used in Universities in the U.S having a lock on the market - perhaps this is why the people polled prefer it?
So I take the question more as: given whatever computer platform you are stuck on, what screen reader do you prefer?
Feel free to share the poll though, maybe it will clarify.
He even gave a demo to the team at one point of what it was like to navigate editors, screens and browsers as a blind person, starting with the screen reader at a normal speed and ramping it up to what he was accustomed to.
I'm a little sad I didn't get to work with him directly outside of a single time he helped me test some custom UI elements, so I don't know much more about his take on voiceover versus jaws, but this was also over a decade ago. I'm sure things have changed more than a little since then.
I don't know if it the same now, but when I was there certain aspects of the customer experience were held sacred.
Well, now you know different :-)
* Fenrir for a userland CLI screen reader
* Orca for GUI screen reader and you'll want to start Orca before you start other apps so it can do some magic with accessibility export variables and ATSPI stuff. I don't understand it and I still do the ritual of putting export linux-a11y = 1 in .profile just in case. That's not the exact variable but the list is out there somewhere.
* cups-filters for printing to Braille embossers/printers. I think just about every major distro has the embosser drivers now. Linux can even use imagemagick to convert images into Braille graphics. Meanwhile Windows doesn't even come with embosser drivers, let alone printing graphics to them. If only GUI Linux accessibility were better. It's already got a really good base. Braille support for just about any display you have and all. Not very good TTS engines though. Anyway sorry for making this longer than just list of stuff.
https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/index.html.en
I used it briefly years ago for some tests but in general I'm guessing NVDA and JAWS on Windows are probably better options.
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.
I think Google and Microsoft are catching up with Android and Windows respectively.
Is that the case here? Not enough regular care and cage cleaning? This seems like a DEI class-action lawsuit nightmare in the making.
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.
Sadly, no plans for ulysses on windows.
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!
What "others" are there except Microsoft Windows and Linux - both also having plenty users here saying that they see those OSes as ahead of Apple? Seems to me that at best Apple is on par, not someone to celebrate above others.
I was thinking about when Google launched their progressive web apps page a few years ago with the Accessibility section marked as ‘coming soon’ – not good enough!
I was also thinking about the marketing oomph Apple have put behind innovative accessibility features over the last year or so: https://www.apple.com/accessibility/ It’s great to see a company’s accessibility page being more than a dry statement of conformance with WCAG 2.1. As far as I could tell, they were the first major tech company to take a lead on this.
They clearly do need to do more work. As do we all!
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.
OP seems to be happy with the functionality of VoiceOver on Mac but not with the stability of VoiceOver on Mac.
You don't mention what actually works for you (on your Mac - you do mention that), only that you disagree with the article.
I don't mean to editorialize, the title was just too long for the title box.