Last time I saw a poll of blind CS/engineering students across NA, the wide majority preferred JAWS as a screen reader. That implies Windows.
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.
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.
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.
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.