I'm loving my mac...

It's presence in the boot menu and in the recovery disk is 11/10 for me and I don't have a lenovo to try if their accessibility is that good but except them maybe on windows we don't have such capability as far as I know.
I looove macos cursor in text field and it's become my favourite thing that I miss each time I'm on my windows 11 or chromeos flex, in spite of creating a thread about VO text issues on the mac which are still real in my opinion but that doesn't mean that the whole thing is fundamentally broken which it's not.
As much as I like the browsing experience on windows, I can't help but feel that with vo on the mac we have one less layer which means that we are closer to the website than any screen reader on windows, philosophically at least. When it doesn't break that site it's actually cool! But I am not sure to be willing to sacrifice my comfort in website and web apps just for a philosophy. There are problems with this approach which are commonly shared by any screen reader that doesn't parse the web content upfront, which from my understanding is anything outside windows, excluding orca because for this one I just don't know. And chromevox is slightly better at solving them generally speaking.
The fact that math content is supported with VO out of the box on the web, as buggy as it might be sometimes when it's not mathjax but mathml. This is something that nvaccess need to implement asap especially given the recent math content bug that was patched, breaking 3rd party addons ironically. I don't know at all the technical details I haven't bothered to read it on github (yet), but suffize it to say that I would have had a very rough semester had I not had a mac to open webwork on.
Especially since sequoia, the iwork suite and other productivity apps with VO has become quite nice, so much bug have been corrected across pages, numbers, preview, calculator (yes), notes and so on.
The go to top item with vo shift escape has singel handedly improved the experience a lot, especially considering that it was working since day one properly and hasn't been broken yet, recalling sonoma and all the versions on ventura I had since july 2023.
Commander, for windows users, is again another great of this version so we can finally assign vo modifier combinations to a lot of unused keys. I will never get why people complain about a feature that doesn't break anything, works well, and that if you don't need it it doesn't bother you at all. Like seriously? The traditional commander is still there. Yes the ui could have been a lot better but you don't use this 24/7 just once in a while to remove, add or correct something.
A cross platform update, but I am sooo happy that we can finally stop blinking cursor in braille, and I am a huge fan about how they have implemented it. Could have been more intuitive but this is the best execution of their philosophy of built-in accessibility that I am extremely in love with.
About macos in particular, I'll let other people way smarter than me describe that better, but the os has a lot that I love, especially the background (as far as I understand it).

Lenovo apparently has an application for changing bio settings. Have not seen this myself, but have read about it. Only thing I can think of with regards to the Matt cursor and text navigation would be navigating by character, Word, etc. with trackpad Commander, but perhaps he is talking about something else?
I disregard when anybody says that VoiceOver for macOS has less UI Layers than any other screen reader. That is just silly talk.

I'm challenging myself to list only positive things about the Mac and Sequoia. I'll keep it going as long as I can. But as soon as I let a negative slip, I lose. Here goes.

• I like the redesigned Mac Mini. My 2018 Intel-based Mac Mini doubled as a hotplate to keep my coffee warm. The new Mac Mini is so cool and quiet I can't even tell it's running.
• VoiceOver comes on at the login prompt. Very slick.
• When a new Mail message arrives, I hear a chime, then a few seconds later, VoiceOver announces a summary. I have found this to be quite handy.
• The Mac, along with iOS, remain the only two platforms where blind people can use Scrivener. This remains true despite the new bugs that came with Sequoia.

Bzzzz! Sorry, Paul, you said something negative. Thanks for playing.

"Some other things I love about VoiceOver include being able to customize whether it announces headings, buttons, and other attributes before or after the item’s "

Where do I find this option?
I can't find it in VO Utility.

Also Hot spots broke in Sohoma for me .

Thanks Ron (Intel Macbook Air)

It's in VO Utility, Verbosity, Speech tab, Custom Verbosity. It has been a while since I tinkered with this, so I can't provide instructions for how to use it. But I bet you can figure it out.

It's worth noting that some things can't be controlled. For example, if you open the web rotor with VO+U and arrow to the headings menu, the heading level is always pronounced before the heading text. No way to turn that off.

It's refreshing to see threads like this, given all the negativity about VoiceOver as of late. I myself am on my second Mac, and although VoiceOver does have its issues they do get resolved efficiently for the most part. All this customizability on Mac OS and iOS is wonderful. In addition, Mac OS seems to play nicely with my eReader. I have yet to try out Braille with iOS, but if it's anything like I've read and heard it will be a real treat.

Many thanks Paul..

I have looked there several times and not realised the options were to the right of each item listed !!!,

Ron.

Fewer operating system problems, such as crashes, than on any Microsoft Windows system that I've used. Also, the BSD UNIX underpinnings provide all the standard command line tools one would expect. The security reputation is relatively solid, too.

The hardware and operating system work together with full compatibility. This can be achieved with Linux as well, as long as you buy hardware which is fully supported (for example, certified to run Linux), but with the Mac, you get the compatibility without having to do the hardware research. Modern Mac hardware offers good performance also.

I appreciate Apple's approach to backward compatibility - requiring software developers to update their applications within a reasonable time to run on newer operating systems, rather than maintaining decades of backward-compatibility as Microsoft does. Apple is also effective at replacing older applications with new versions as appropriate. This can lead to welcome simplicity. The Mac has only one System Settings app, whereas on my Windows system, configuration is divided between Settings, Control Panel, and the Local Group Policy Editor, instead of being centralized.

Some Linux desktop environments will give you the advantages of simplicity and consistency also. It isn't unique to Apple.

Braille across apple platforms for supported devices is literally plug and play wired, and more or less the same story for bluetooth connection when it's not a relic of the Elder Days (sorry, it was too tempting :) ).
Mac, you can really do a lot offline if you are unboxing your new hardware and it's factory settings and install without needing to install 3rd party or even 1st party software. The complete productivity suite is there. Even things that could not necessarily be accessible somehow are like freeform.
Mac allows blind to control the esthetics of their creation relatively more easily than on other systems generally speaking, a happy consequence of why graphists love apple platforms so much.
@Jason White I was talking about people like you :).
About macos in particular, I'll let other people way smarter than me describe that better, but the os has a lot that I love, especially the background (as far as I understand it).
I don't know if nvda support emoticons and smily natively now but I have always had the addon which is often updated so I guess it's not really the case, or there are some edge cases requiring this addon to still be maintained. Voiceover? Everything is native.

@TheBlindGuy07,

Pressing Windows + period will open a panel where you have access to a metric crap ton of emoji, mathematical and chemical sybology, and much more. Similar to pressing FN, FN on macOS. 😀
This way the screen reader of choice does not matter.

Just, ya know, for your information. 😉

I'm talking about the screen reader announcing them.

😁, This emoji reads as, "Beaming face with smiling eyes", when I select it from the panel I mentioned above. Note this is using latest Build of NVDA without Emoticons add-on.
Does that help?

They mean emoticons like this

I’m really happy with my Mac :-)
never mind, Safari is not responding again :-(

Oh okay nice I get it now. So my point is still valid, vo has smileys as well as emogi native and not nvda.

I find that VoiceOver reading ASCII smilies is a bit of an issue, along with emoticons, dates, and a good handful of acronyms. As someone who works as an editor, I need a way for my screen reader to tell me exactly what text the author has submitted. When VoiceOver says "smiley," how do I know whether the text is the word smiley, the smiley emoticon, or the ASCII colon parenthesis? The only way to find out what's really there is to arrow through it a character at a time, which is slow.

I'm repeating myself from another thread here - but like Paul I'll try not to be negative.

I love the numpad and keyboard commanders even though they are not called that now.

Oh this is quite hard isn't it? I want to slag off the new way of customising the keys, so let's pretend that thought didn't occur to me.

I love how all the navigation things work everywhere. So I can jump to buttons, text boxes or whatever in any app, anywhere. Whereas with NVDA I have to be in a web page.

I love not having to bother with single key nav - I appreciate that a key does what it does and I don't have to think about context. (Ouch, that's my tongue well and truly bitten...)

Maybe it's because I'm just used to it, but I like using VO+left/right to just get around things that otherwise might not get focus. Yes there's the object explorer thing in nvda, and maybe I would get used to it eventually.

I love being able to copy something on my phone and paste it on my Mac. This has made using MFA tokens so much less painful and I use it all the time.

Right, going to stop whilst I'm ahead....

Folks should really stop with the comparisons. If you like your Mac, that is wonderful. If you love VoiceOver on Mac, truly, that is awesome. Nobody should scold you for what you like, and what works, for, you. So why, oh why, must there always be some Mac user trying to skate uphill, just to prove their point, that their preferred way of doing things, is superior to anybody, and everybody, else's way?

Seriously, you're praising VoiceOver for being able to (natively) read emoticons? That is not always a good thing. Have you ever read a formatted document, where emoticons are read out, even though emoticons are not (technically) being used within the text?
As PaulMartz pointed out, this can be an issue. Especially when trying to proofread written work.

They’re actually just pronunciation dictionary entries, emoticons, that is,you can strip them out if you want, same thing goes for 802.11 B, etc., they’re just there by default instead of you manually having to add them.