looking for some more advance resources to learn to use pages and word on mac with voiceover

Hey fellow student!
I hope your gpa is/will be going well.
Unfortunately as much as I wish currently for me it's the end of the semester and I don't have the time I'd want and go in details in this specific topic about how pages/word are in need of serious improvements with voiceover on macos. I'll just mention some critical bugs you will probably encounter and which I saw mentioned nowhere on this website (plan to do exactly that when my semester ends).
I don't know which program / courses you intend to take, however there are some common things you should be aware of.
Stick to pages: microsoft word on macos, as of the time I'm writing this, is just close to horrible. You won't enjoy it at all. If you have some experience on windows at that time, it's way slower than nvda with word 2016 before beta support for uia, + there is a total lack of structural navigation with voiceover. The only thing I use word for on mac is to convert readable texts to html and open in safari, such as bookshare stuff.
Pages has a very good amount of its own problems, you can already view one of my latest topic about a very frustrating bug I encountered during a f quiz! which happens everywhere in pages eve in native .pages document. This distinction is very important, as the following bug is specific to converted .docx/.doc to .pages, or just opening word in pages. Basically even if with vo-t voiceover will generally announce the formatting info under the cursor, none of the navigation command to go to next/previous italic, bold, ... text, etc don't work while as far as I know visually there is 0 problem. Moreover I noticed that when trying to navigate by link with find next/previous link voiceover virtually restarts, in word documents open in pages / converted and saved.
However, excel is very usable and I prefer it to numbers 100%.
Mathml content somehow works on the web but ithe navigation commands don't work in pages or elsewhere.
Calculator deserves its own article and I am very surprised why it doesn't alrady exist, basically you must turn off the cursor tracking of vo, turn on at least the speech for results, and to navigate in functions use fast search with the usual bug and 0 logic of vo because otherwise it would actually work.
I hope you have the technical skill, or willingness, to learn how to mess around the bugs on macos, and/or have a windows virtual machine or host computer with it. I find my mac very very painful to use sometimes and deliberately choose to work on windows whenever I can.
Don't make the mistake of assuming kindle app on macos will have the same accessibility of the ios/ipados because it doesn't, and especially if you have a windows you'd have to choose where you purchase a reading / textbook, apple books, kindle, or... I haven't tried it yet but. I guess play books might work and since it's cross platform.
I don't want to ve overly negative but realistic, I am a junior developer and very comfortable with learning new technologies, I thought macos will be as good as, or close to the other apple products (iphone) in terms of accessibility, but it doesn't. There is a lot I can do on windows that I can't do on mac (or I can but the experience is a real torture), be it dev stuff (terminal) or students basic and comfortable text editing and formatting.
Even basic things in social science which are mainly text courses are a pain to do on mac.
But again maybe you are in another program and will be lucky enough so most of your teachers can forward you raw .pages documents and others. And I assume you are blind or very voiceover dependent.
Best of luck!
PS: other applevis users can disagree with my negativity towards macos, but as a student and user on this website I am genuinly just telling my 9 months experience with having a macbook and finding it unusually difficutl to perform the most common and basics tasks, or universally accessible text based things not being so at all because of how voiceover handles , content, period. Feel free to comment!

Hey!
First I am also an indian immigrant living in Canada.
Second, I bought a mac for exactly the same reason, my hp laptop on windows 11 wasn't holding battery well and finding plugs in college classrooms is not easy.
Social science? I didn't want to make you afraid but just tell you that you'll have a hard time. *However* eis it not that it isn't duable, it is. But the real torture that come with it is not worth it especially if I can just work on my assignments on my windows laptop at home most of the time. Even google docs is functional for team work but again windows will always be my first choice.
For pages, and numbers, another bug I discovered just a couple minutes ago is that the vo-space within tables to edit cell content doesn't work, a workaround is vo-shift-space but then be careful to not go before the first or after the last character of the cell you'll have to return back and redo the process again to edit it. (edit it after first typing which can be done by just typing on the cell no need to interact or anything)
My personal setup is that I use my mac and it's killer apple silicon (m2 pro) battery to take notes, and the actual real assignments, writings, are usually done at home on my windows laptop.
Excel is surprisingly accessible on mac better than number so for these random mendatory statistics class in social science I have to take this is a good thing.
Teams is good for chat, call, downloading documents sent in chat and sharing screen on chrome with caret browsing enabled (haven't tried in safari yet just cause I'm lazy to turn off the privacy thing but you can definitely try it).
It is just so much worst than windows for most of the thing, like symbols being read only with option right arrow, and things like commas and periods are append at the begining of the next word. And whether there's 1 line break or 10 vo won't tell anything with option-right/left arrow you'll have to use your judgement and up down arrow to make sure where you are. From these two messages of mine I can totally understand why you are uncomfortable. I actually didn't sell my mac simply because I am a geek and aspirant developer so I can thank god and all the people at microsoft and nvaccess to actually provide us with good and functional accessibility on windows and take this as a challenge to hopefully in summer start a real bug report and send it to apple so they stop marketing accessibility and actually work on it again.
Hope this helps, don't hesitate to contact me by pm for more questions as our current usage of the mac is so similar I'd be glad to help you with tips and advice to not upgrade :P.
Quick note vmware fusion player is free and works better than utm for windows 11 on arm virtual machine for macos.

Hi friends,

I've got a four part guide right here on AppleVis for using Pages on a Mac. I have used Pages to complete a Master's thesis with a table of contents, end notes, sections, headings, and headers and footers.

Click here to go to the first guide. There are links at the bottom to take you through each part.

Thanks for Kevin for putting this out for everyone. I find the following post, also by Kevin, also relevant:
https://www.applevis.com/guides/adding-polish-your-pages-documents