Sticking with Mac: What Keeps You Loyal?

The thing is what prevented me to sell my macbook because of the bugs was the hardware and battery life, but ultimately the macos operating system, which has been already described a lot here. It's just that for some thing voiceover doesn't follow the technology stacks especially on the web compared to windows screen readers, and bugs take awhile to get fixed when they actually are fixed. I still believe that Voiceover has the inherent capacity to be the best screen reader on the market surpassing even NVDA, but this is up to Apple to make it true and to the community to keep reporting even when it seems it's for nothing, because ultimately they have created such a system for the best or the worst that this is our only course of action we can reasonably take as a the group voiceover has been developed for. What frustrates me the most actually is that ios voiceover is like 40% if not more better than its macos counterpart from text selection where VO actually manages the selection, to scrolling, which are two of my absolute main grudges and when/if they eventually get fix I couldn't be happier. Also we have to differentiate actual bugs, from undocumented scripts/features ending up as bugs, and fundamental design flaws/oversights where I'd include how easy the accessibility apis can be overloaded, aka snr and much more.
Ultimately as I have noticed over the last 7-8 months I tend to use much more my mac for day to day things and college work and mainly use my windows machine for very specific things, some websites for leasures and google docs when I can. This essentially means that my mac is very very slowly becoming my main machine where most of the real work is done, and I couldn't be happier about that. Aside accessibility I genuinely think that the iwork suite is much more blind friendly, *aside accessibility* like unable to navigate elements that aren't on the visible screen or portion of ui visible to VO, and the previous scrolling issue mentioned. Because they are free now, and even then it's much more than the average student will need. Funnily excel is quite amazing to use on the mac with VO, which isn't the case for word currently, drag and drop can do so much! Pdf, if we ignore the selection and text attributes, is getting increasingly better on the mac, and preview already offers us the complete package as we can sign the pdf directly. I already mentioned math content which is maybe convoluted sometimes but works out of the box, and nvda if we ignore the addons is completely behind for this as of now. Braille display wired connections for the compatible ones is plug and play and already in 2014 was a huge strength for the mac and apple ecosystem in general. The ability to stop cursor blinking for both the screen and the braille display is so well implemented that it's truly the most quality of life update we got in Sequoia after the commander, which, come on guys, if you don't like it nothing has changed for the shortcuts already present before the update. Compared to Sonoma, the racio of new features that just work with Vo and aren't broken is much higher this year, and we also must acknowledge the subtle bug patches they've brought across the system. Okay since 15.2 this is a bit questionable, but still! And see my beta 3 topic to see the two patches I've found so far.
A tip for windows users, I know that the mouse / touch pad is not in the accessibility culture, but if you ignore the one with macbooks you will lost a big part of VO in the process. I've noticed recently that at several occasions just dragging the finger can enable us to access the controls in a group of element where nothing else works.
My take is this one, ideally, about 100+ blind users at least should purchase macs, and if just 30 of them are competent enough to report bugs, I believe that VO will continue this positive trend. Would I recommend the mac to the average blind user? I don't think so. Do I want more users to have a mac? It's a 100% yes for the above reason.

In Windows, there is few online audio games where we can meet more blind people, but in Mac, there is no proper free games and online audio games. That is the only disadvantage. I feel.
Learning Mac is bit more complicated, if you don’t understand, but windows have more materials for learning than Mac
I am trying to do screen recording on my Mac with my headset. It is very complicated, and it is irritating sometimes, but coming to experience. Mac gives me more better experience than Windows, especially battery life and in build quality.
Even though I am having MacBook M1 air, I’m very happy slowly we Indians are getting into Apple ecosystem, and we will also explore more
Down the line after 4 to 5 years, you can see more Indian YouTubers doing videos on MacBook

Yeah it's happened to me at least once on Windows too.

Well I tried this again and it did seem to make sense this time. Not sure if maybe it was broken in whichever version of Sonoma I had been using at the time or if I was just having a bad blind day.

I went back to a comment from a while ago by, the blind guy I think, who suggested that some apps work better with standard grouping instead of ignore groups. And whilst PodCasts works anyway it does seem better this way. Also the Mac App Store is a lot better with standard grouping. So maybe that's where I was going wrong.

Anyway I'm still not a massive fan of this kind of interface but maybe this is the secret.

The topic reliably gets asked every few months on here with much the same pros and cons raised, all of which I find valid. Perhaps it's worth pointing out, though, that the fact of its being asked so much signals something. I have not seen this on a Windows forum. Anyone wondering about the question should also browse the Mac forum and see what kinds of issues we Mac users face and make an informed decision about your next computer.
Mac is a very sexy, high maintenance partner. It's a great OS with a buggy screen reader, particularly on the web. I think Apple Accessibility listens to us; I don't think Apple software engineers listen to them. Windows is a rather awful OS but with screen reader developers working full-time to cope with it and screen reader updates on an ongoing frequent basis. I think Apple and Google distribute awareness of accessibility widely within their development worflows, and ensure that virtually everything about their products is both accessible and extremely unpleasant to use. I use both Mac and Windows daily but always move to my Windows machine when I want to make sure something critical on the web works, if it's accessible at all.
To answer the OP directly, though, I am not loyal to Mac. Personally, I don't believe any product or corporation deserves loyalty. "What have you done for me lately?" My next laptop will be Windows, no matter what, because of less-problematic web and MS Office accessibility. I bought and have stuck with Mac for the past four years because of iPhone integration, the OS, the hardware, and a specific Mac app. But several of those factors are changing:
1. Windows phone link now provides good integration on the PC, despite one current bug. I can send/receive messages, receive notifications, and even control audio playback, if I would ever want to do such a thing, plus make/receive calls.
2. Several well-designed NVDA addons provide some of my favorite Mac functionality, including shortcut keys to activate specific applications, quick access to favorite folders, and system-wide sentence navigation.
3. ARM laptops seem to be rapidly closing the hardware gap. I have my ear on The Surface Laptop 7 or its successor, which supposedly has Macbook-like speakers and battery life. I basically stick with common-as-dirt apps that are available on ARM, except for NVDA itself, which is a 32-bit app that runs emulated on ARM, greatly reducing battery life, I think. But I'm finding Narrator to be improving very nicely for some situations, including writing, which I can do without hick-up while running the amazing Neural voices.
4. Microsoft has announced that it's working on a native class-II audio driver that will, only 21 years after audio devices started using that specification, let me plug in my DACs without installing their own drivers. The driver has been available in Windows 11 x86 for a little while now, but I'm scared to uninstall my DAC drivers to see if it works.

...I guess that was actually an answer to the opposite question being posed, but oh well.

I mean, obviously I'm pretty new. But this is sort of what I was trying to get at by saying it works, as opposed to the common "it *just* works", implying that Windows or Android or what have you is a broken nightmare. I'm not really super loyal to Mac, I switch because reasons and stuff works, so I can switch permanently and see how it goes.

It's funny because some of the universal stuff that gets touted here as being awesome and making Windows so primitive because it doesn't have it is stuff I don't generally use. As an example, ctrl-t is supposed to swap characters, and it does. Well, it does, depending on where you are. It doesn't in this edit field in Firefox, for example. So it's just not a shortcut I rely on at all. Ditto, cmd-semicolon? That's supposed to move through misspellings I believe, and again, there are places where it fails to do anything at all.

That doesn't really bother me because I'm so used to not doing those things from Windows that I'm just editing like I normally do. I also don't get the thing about navigating by sentences or paragraphs, I've never used that in any screen reader I've ever used. I'm glad it's there for people who like it, but I've personally never seen the point.

For me, it's just like switching to iPhone. I had an Android for a while, really old, like I think the latest it ran was 6 and that was back when that was a current update. And what I found was that my old iPod touch seemed more responsive. Also things did work better, e.g. I didn't browse the web on the phone a lot, but I tried it on Android and never did get it working, while I could do it, pretty painfully but at least it worked, on the iPod.

So for me, coming from an iPod and thus iOS and moving to Android didn't really work out. I gather that Android, even with defaults, is a lot more accessible now. I don't know that I feel a need to try it now. But let's say, as an example, that it had really great apps for mobile audio work. If I was going to do that? Yeah, maybe I'd try it, and maybe it would work, and I'd switch to that instead of the iPhone.

As many people have pointed out there are pros and cons, and as my friend often points out, it mostly doesn't matter if it's a PC or Mac or whatever flavor of phone, they're all computers. So you think about some of the basic stuff, browsing the web, email, games, we have that on all of the devices, fewer on Mac sure, but they're there, Esp. if you have an M series. Ditto writing, somebody on the AudioGames forum back when I was asking about stuff said a relative, their brother maybe, wrote all of his college papers on a phone, forget which one.

The same friend who points out they're all computers started on Pages I think but ended up writing all of their papers, for a music degree, with Ulysses and Markdown. I'm pretty sure that was on their Mac, but it's possible they could have written some on the phone during their commute, I should ask about that. All they'd need is a Bluetooth keyboard, because they have access to Ulysses on the phone too. I'm sure you could do something similar with Windows, Android, and a cloud service.

So personally, I'd love to see a *lot* more stuff like that than the constant complaining whenever this stuff comes up. I switched for new DAWs, but as people have pointed out, again, you can pretty much do whatever you need to in either OS. That's not to say one OS, or one DAW, or one writing app, or whatever doesn't do some nicer things than others running under another OS. It's also not saying we shouldn't point out bugs, or possible improvements, or what have you.

But every time this kind of thread comes up, you'd swear (insert person's disfavored system) is completely and utterly unusable and you can't get anything done with it. And I'm sorry, that's just not true. We have people doing all their work on Windows. We have people doing all their work on Mac. We have at least two people here doing all of their work on a phone, which I'd love to hear more about. Work here means whatever they're doing, not employment as such.

That shouldn't make us uncritical, by any means. But it's so amazing, I wish we appreciated it more and gave more tips on how a thing is possible, instead of jumping to, "that will never work", e.g. using your phone as your only computer gets this a lot.

I am just waiting for someone to come on here and blow us away with everything they are doing on Linux these days! 🐧👨‍💻

All the reasons OP mentioned, plus it's just intuitive for me. I can also leave my Mac on and let it go to sleep when inactive. I can leave it for weeks without having to restart.

I have been both a Mac and Windows user. I recently switched back to using a Mac full time. I may add Windows on a VM, but I haven’t needed it yet.

I’ve definitely been unhappy with voiceOver on the Mac at times in the past. If you need proof, just find some of my previous posts. I got so fed up with it at times that I swore to never use it again.

I got a computer with windows 3.1 between fifth and sixth grade. It had a screen reader named WinVision on it. It wasn’t the most accessible thing in the world, but I had Open Book, and that opened up a whole new world in books that were hard to get in Braille. I started on Windows 95 with Jaws in high school. I’ve spent the majority of my life on windows. I have taken the test, and I am certified in both JAWS and NVDA. Windows isn’t what it used to be. I feel the best Windows experience for a blind user was between about 2004 and 2009. Yes, the days of XP.

My first Apple experience was with an old Apple computer as a child, but I don’t remember what it was, don’t count it, and it ended up blowing away. The next time I played with a Mac was in 2006. I was dating a lady at the time who worked for apple. She brought home a MacBook Pro for the weekend and chose to rub it in my face that my Dells weren’t made of titanium. I didn’t have long to play with voiceOver, but I found it tough to adjust to, and I came to the conclusion that a Mac wasn’t ready to be used as a full time computing solution for a screen reader user.

Now, we jump forward to January 2010. I learned the iPhone 3GS was accessible, and I bought one. VoiceOver was a dream on the iPhone. I began to get curious. Is it time to check out a Mac again. I played with them some, and I eventually ended up with one of my now ex wife’s hand-me-downs. I used it for a while, but I was using word a lot, and the experience was far from seamless. I ended up getting fed up and switching to a Surface.

In the past six years, I have gone through two Surfaces and a Dell XPS. The first surface was replaced under warranty when it died, and the second had sound card issues. The headphone jack would often quit working with a screen reader. I wasn’t the only person to have this problem. The XPS lasted almost four years, but it got used a lot, and it was about ready to fall apart.

I thought long and hard about what I wanted. I played with my old Intel Mac. I thought about where windows was headed. I thought about what was important to me.

In the end, Both operating systems have their bugs, and neither is better than the other. Windows screen readers are more feature rich than ever, but they don’t perform the basic functions as well as they used to. Mac is a much more stable operating system, but voiceOver has its bugs which I shouldn’t need to reiterate for anyone on here. Everything else around my house, minus my Sonos speakers which work well with apple products, is Apple. I like the battery life and the build of the Mac. I like the uniformity of the layout and how you navigate it with voiceOver. I like that my computer is part of the Apple ecosystem in my home. That’s why I’m with Mac.

I can understand why people wouldn’t want to use a Mac. I would venture a guess that over 90 percent of us who were born blind and learned to use a screen reader in school learned on windows. This might also ring true for those of you who learned to use a screen reader later in life, but I can’t be sure. It’s easiest to stick with what you know. It’s not easy to learn a whole new layout and the keystrokes to navigate it when you have been doing the same thing for years. I think it’s much easier for a mouse user to point and click on a new system. After all, for a sited user, how you navigate remains the same. It’s only the location of things that change. You have more screen readers to choose from on the windows side. Sometimes they both work; sometimes one of them works, and sometimes nothing works, but you probably like the fact that you have options. You know the problems you have with windows, and you know how to navigate around many of them. Making the switch means learning how to navigate a whole new set of problems.

I don’t think there is a wrong choice, but this is why I’m using a Mac for the foreseeable future.