How can you even use terminal daily on macos with voiceover!? Major bugs with vim

I use terminal on daily basis and I find myself has no need to get back to GUI solutions. Note: don't be sad if my solution does not work for you.

First, make sure to interact with "Shell" text. All my commands assume this step is already done.

Use VO+arrows to navigate word by word (left and right) or line by line (up and down).

For announcements, keep in mind that VoiceOver speaks the text it pass by. For example, if you already moved after the first word in a line using VO+right arrow, then press VO+down, it will just announce what is after this word in this line. If you come from windows background, you will find this behavior different.

Navigating the keyboard cursor usually moves VoiceOver cursor. However, there has been a bug since Mac OS 13 (I guess), that VoiceOver cursor might be in a different position from keyboard cursor. As a solution, move keyboard cursor (using arrow keys for instance) twice and VoiceOver cursor will follow up.

For speaking rate, there is a new bug in Mac OS 15 that the rate/volume might not change when adjusted from VO+command+shift menu. So, it does not work all the time. I use Alex as my main Voice. As a solution, change it manually from VoiceOver utility.

Regarding skipping text in vim, yes this occasionallly takes place. Switching to another application of different activity, restarting vim/neovim and restarting VoiceOver usually fixes it and some other issues as well.

Another note regarding skipping text, but the slower your device, the more text it will skip as long as you press commands fast. You might need to synchronize your presses with VoiceOver or buy a faster device. I use M2Max. I have 2020 Intel iMac for work, and I just stick it to Mac OS 13. Mac OS 15 is slower than its predecessors.

For sure, VoiceOver could have been better, but it is what it is. Let's hope a good luck for Apple Accessibility team and a better future for everyone.

A couple of advice for you:

• Generally speaking, you will find help menu (VO+h) very useful for you to learn more commands as a novice.
• In VoiceOver, there are many ways to do the same task apparently. As a matter of fact, usually they are different implementations, thus different results in some cases.
• It sounds that you are new to VoiceOver. My general advice here is to be patient and dedicate some time to learn. For sure, you will find a way as long as it is text based interface. Any new interface is difficult to learn since you don't know whether it works properly or not. Bugs are everywhere, but detecting them needs time and experience.

Hope that helps. You can find more about my terminal usage here.

I use the terminal utility that come out of the box with Mac OS. I have tried tdsr before, but did not like it. That was after many years of using the default terminal app.

It's fiddly but usable. I do wish it were better but it's certainly not the worst of apple's apps and won't be a priority for them. It would be great if there were another app that could fill in made by a 3rd party, apple's own apps tend to be pretty junk when it comes to accessibility, but I can't imagine that happening.

As to why I never upgraded past macOS Monterey. I'm not saying terminal in Monterey is perfect, but overall, macOS works fairly well in Monterey with voiceover, over the newer version of macOS. Of course there is the whole SNR thing, but using a third-party browser does help.

Is there a specific reason why you have to use Vim, or any other ncurses-based tool for that matter? Vim was my go to editor back in my sighted days, but that was because I was actually productive with it. These days, although I do use the console a lot, I do not do text editing in a terminal window. Whenever I have to edit a file from terminal I just launch TextMate using its mate command-line utility as I mentioned in a reply to a previous thread of yours.

Of all the problems that Apple could fix, Terminal is probably the only one for which there is no algorithmic solution, because text-based interfaces do not provide the kind of semantic information that screen-readers rely on in order to convey the user interface to you. Technically speaking, a terminal is just a bidimensional array of colored fixed-size characters, and that's exactly how it is presented to sighted users. What text applications do is move the caret around and print out characters with different color combinations to draw content that visually might resemble a graphical user interface but makes absolutely no sense to a screen-reader. While it is possible to deploy some kind of heuristic to attempt to make sense out of the visual content of the terminal, doing so would be pointless in my opinion considering that there are usually far better solutions with actual accessibility semantics available, so I don't think anyone is going to waste time tackling that.

I'm not saying that interacting with Terminal using VoiceOver is already the best experience you can have, because it is definitely not, and could actually be significantly improved if only Apple paid a little attention to the state of accessibility on MacOS. However I do not think that it is reasonable to expect a screen-reader to work flawlessly under the conditions that I mentioned above, and especially with applications that move the text caret around the terminal window unpredictably.

You could always try third-party terminal solutions. I am fairly certain there are a few accessible ones on the Mac side of things.

Never heard of any accomplished blind people using Vim or any other text-based ncurses applications comfortably with a general purpose screen-reader on any platform, which is the subject that I am addressing in this thread, but what do I know? And it's not even hard to prove me wrong if such people actually exist, since we are on the Internet after all!

Again I did not say that VoiceOver cannot be improved, only that your expectation to be able to use that kind of application comfortably on a terminal with a screen-reader is unrealistic. The only exception I'm aware of is in the case of Emacs, because people built a whole desktop experience around it with its own screen-reader called Emacspeak, but then it's no longer NVDA or VoiceOver or Orca or even a terminal anymore..

On Windows my impression is that people just use Microsoft's Visual Studio Code in general. The developers room of the AudioGames forum is a good place to ask this kind of question on as lots of blind developers tend to gather around there, but I do believe that I already know what people are likely to answer, and it will not be too different from what I said earlier. You wouldn't even be the first person to not like my suggestions here and go there asking for confirmation only to get exactly the same kind of answer from other developers, and I actually encourage people to do it, because there's always the possibility of me being wrong and learning something new, which is my ultimate goal.