12 of my top-10 gripes with Windows

The "Windows versus Mac" threads around here crop up like hackberry trees, and I think it's a good thing. Obviously, a lot rides on our computers, particularly as blind or low vision people, and things do change over time; so, the questions are worth revisiting from time to time. But, because there isn't a good Windows equivalent to AppleVis, I tend more to see complaints about Mac and advice to stick with Windows under certain conditions, dotted with contrasting ra-ra Apple enthusiasm that is less nuanced. I've been part of many of those sorts of threads. So, I thought it would be a good idea to balance that a bit with my gripes about Windows. I always maintain both systems, but I am, after all, typing this on a Mac for a reason. I've had several bouts of "the grass is greener" making me buy one platform and then returning to the other. At this point, I just have to concede that there are a lot of problems with both, and I'd better keep both around so that I can flea from one to another when something screws up badly on one platform or the other. I know that's a privilege. The really hard part is adjusting to the two typing styles (forward-oriented on Windows, passed-by on Mac: delete versus backspace). I could certainly offer up a list of gripes just as long or longer for my Mac, but that's already documented on AppleVis. I hope folks will chime in with your own pet peeves as a reality-check against our equally-real problems with our Macs.

1. Microsoft Office. As is very well-documented here, those of us chained to MS Office by our employers invariably need to do almost all of that work in Windows. There's no substitute for third party screen readers when the requirement is to keep up with changes in both an OS and office suite from two rival companies. But I bought a Mac again as soon as those chains loosened. NVDA+Outlook had a recent period of crashing every time I cursored down over a graphic in an email message. Furthermore, NVDA was very slow in processing complex HTML messages. Also, NVDA reads an annoying amount of information when navigating the email message list, reading all the least-important tabular and group information prior to getting around to the sender and subject. Every second of that is stolen from my life by my job by way of the assistive technology, and that spiked my blood pressure pretty constantly. In MS Word, meanwhile, NVDA and Jaws have both been fatally unreliable at reading the comments pane under heavy usage, which is how I issue feedback on student papers. NVDA works very poorly with the authoring side of PowerPoint, at least on my system in recent years. So, while Windows remains the only professional-grade platform for MS Office with speech, I hate it. Jaws is better than NVDA in this particular niche, when it doesn't crash—which has always been extremely often on my systems, year after year, so that I don't even ask my employer to maintain a subscription.
2. No accessible Markdown apps. Regardless of how much care I put into formatting in Word, there are always a few embarrassing surprises with font changes, unintentional indents, run-on italics, etc. Markdown, as a basic HTML shorthand, gives a blind person 100% reliable access to what's happening with formatting, and controls the final product through a plain-text style sheet (in most Markdown apps). I was never able to find a markdown solution in Windows, because all the apps take a WYSIWYG approach to the interface.
3. Text-Edit on Mac is superb and under-rated. I use NoteTab++ for most of my HTML and markdown work on Windows, but I did have to do some hacking to get spell check installed, because the plugin screens are not accessible. It's still a poor substitute for a good plain text editor that's fully accessible. NotePad and the ancient Jarte application either don't work with UTF-8 or don't default to it, which is not good for Web writing.
4. For several years now, Windows has not allowed for a preferred audio device to be set. It always moves output to whatever the most recently plugged-in device is. Every time that happens, I have to restart NVDA. I have a lot of different audio devices for different purposes, from my main stereo DAC to bluetooth headsets to portable speakers. Some of them connect to Windows even if the amplifier section is not turned on, or there's nothing plugged into the output (like my interface for microphones), so I lose speech and don't necessarily know where it went. This doesn't happen on Mac. I have to restart NVDA to get it back to the built-in speakers essentially every time I sit down at the computer. Please don't offer trouble-shooting advice here: I am omitting certain details, but the upshot is as stated.
5. The Windows start menu hasn't had good usability since Windows 7. The only thing I've used it for since then is search, and that's mainly because it's harder to use the start menu to find so many of the built-in administrative features using the start menu apps list.
6. So-called "modern" Windows apps. Seriously, how many years has it been, and screen readers are still struggling to make them usable. Compare this and the previous point to the Mac system preferences and app store.
7. Ribbons suck for blind users. Microsoft tossed 20 years of usability evidence regarding pull-down menus out the window. When the ribbon first appeared in Office, it was a return to the "command gallery" of Word 6 that I used in 1987. Then it infected Windows Explorer and just about every other Microsoft app, then Adobe. Most things good about Mac OS date to its origins in UNIX and the "big cat" era, but that's not a bad thing, so long as I get to keep my menu bar.
8. Touch is still an afterthought. Although screen readers all try to implement touch gestures, they get unreliable very quickly. I bought a "bendy" touch-screen Windows laptop hoping to take advantage of a tablet-like interface, but the rapidly-improving Narrator (thanks, ironically, to consulting work by the NV Access Foundation) is the most reliable option for touch. In NVDA and Jaws, a lot of stuff just is either absent or doesn't work reliably enough to be useful. They're too busy putting out other fires to really concentrate on touch. And why haven't screen readers made the touchpad into a useful gesture device like on Mac? Probably because there are multiple manufacturers, but I think two of them control like 90% of the market, at a fairly uninformed guess. While I do have to keep the touchpad turned off on my MacBook, I can turn it on when reading long documents with a drink in my other hand. Or, I can use a bluetooth not-really-magic touchpad for the purpose without the accidental activation problem that exists with the built-in touchpad.
9. Web browsers are a wild west of unpredictability on Windows. Granted, they can virtually always get the job done in the end, including situations that make me shut down my Mac and resort to Windows; but, when Safari works, it's very nice to have sound effects for events like downloads, while I particularly like javascripted combo boxes presented in a nice simple uniform pop-up menu format with a chekmark next to the selected item—the Windows equivalent is crap. Again, the Web is also a great weakness on Mac, as documented in so many threads on here; but, when it works well, it's less jangly than Windows options. I still get frustrated by the history list in Google and why the heck do I need to hit control-enter to activate certain links and buttons in FireFox using NVDA? And, I haven't been able to easily organize bookmarks since Internet Explorer. Dear Google: see above on the usability of simple pull-down menus!
10. I don't need to pull out my phone and use SeeingAI on my Mac computer screen to know if it turned on--"bong!" How many times have I sat there trying to figure out if my Windows computer is on or not after it crashed or when I don't know about the battery status or it's updating. NVDA often even shuts up when shut-down hangs because of apps with unsaved changes.
11. I've never had a Windows laptop whose speakers weren't horrible. I can count on a Mac, at least these days, to have excellent audio, good camera, and good microphone. None of that was true for the last thousand-dollar Windows laptop I bought. After three years, some of its totally anemic speakers are shorting out and the rubber strips on the bottom have fallen off. I also had to use an external microphone on Zoom if I wanted to actually lean back from the computer.
12. Installing or uninstalling apps. Gotta love those Windows security dialogues that hide below everything. Enough said.