The state of VoiceOver for macOS: from superior to suppressed

I started one in 2023, and announcing it was why I actually created an account here after years lurking. It's still available on my GitHub profile as an archived repository, and I owe my last job to that project.

I know a great deal more these days than I did about the accessibility infrastructure when I abandoned Vosh in early 2024, since I needed to do further reverse-engineering at work to work around memory safety issues that were affecting my employer's project and ended up tracing it down to Apple code that I could obviously not just patch on everyone's computers. I won't mind contributing with a proper safe and ergonomic Swift or Rust abstraction to the lower level mess that other people can use to build an alternative screen-reader on if anyone wishes, since I can provide pretty much all the available functionality with the exception of custom rotors which don't have a public API and are obviously not documented so I'll have to reverse-engineer some more to learn how to consume them, however beware that even at the highest levels, accessibility on macOS is still highly inconsistent and incoherent.

Yes I would do that. It is simple we need to write basically the same thing suggesting the same issues and asking they be fixed.

I don't think it's great. I just don't think it's the unusable disaster of a total lack of productivity some people here seem to think it is.

I updated from 15 to 26. I think the only difference I've noticed is that in Mail, some of the VO commands don't do what you'd expect. For instance, if you're composing a message VO-l doesn't read the current line. This isn't a problem for me because I'm used to arrowing through my messages to proof and such.

On the whole what I've found is that if I embrace Voiceover, e.g. I'm using caps lock and arrows a lot, I can get the stuff done that I need to with minimal fuss. I realize that's not everybody's experience, partly because I'm sure we're doing very different things.

There are weird little things that could be better. An example, I use Downcast for podcasts. If you're in a podcast with say, a thousand or so episodes, VO-home and end will take you to either end, but there seems to be no good way to skip through the list in larger increments than the arrows moving one entry at a time. So I end up holding down an arrow key for a while.

There's a similar issue in Finder. I have directories sorted first and first letter navigation seems to jump me into the files if there are any. So I end up using the arrows a lot there too. Could be better, but at least, unlike on Windows, searches actually find things. So it's a bit of a mixed bag.

But for me personally, I don't find it to be so bad that it's unusable or anything like that. I don't notice things getting worse and worse and worse. Much like people complaining about Windows 11 vs. 10, Mac OS 26 pretty much works the same way as Mac OS 15 for me. Same with Windows, you'll hear people complaining that it's so much worse than 10, but as far as I can tell, nothing really changed.

/Great! I'm glad.

May I suggest you post your plan, asking for volunteers to participate when the time is right, and identifying the particular issues you'd like addressed?

So reading thru the comments terrifies me for spending money on a Mack lol. I wonder if next years Mack’s are going to change those vo issues? It looks like they are going to be using the A17 chips that are in iPhone instead of the M chips…

I've followed this discussion closely, and while I fully understand the frustrations many of you have shared, I’d like to offer a more nuanced perspective based on more than ten years of daily use of macOS with VoiceOver. I’m totally blind, and the Mac was my entry point into the world of computers—I had never used Windows before. My very first machine was a 2012 MacBook Pro. Later I moved to a 2016 MacBook Pro, then to an iMac M1 with a MacBook Air M1, and today I work on both an iMac M4 and a MacBook Air M4. Over the years, I’ve also bought several Windows PCs—some of them technically more powerful than my older Intel Macs—but despite the raw performance, none of them gave me the same consistency, logic, or sense of comfort that I get from macOS. I always come back to the Mac simply because it feels like home.

To be completely honest, the only time I truly considered leaving macOS was at the very end of the Intel era. Performance had collapsed, VoiceOver felt sluggish, the entire system seemed to struggle with every action, and everything felt heavier with each update. That’s really the only period where I questioned staying. But the arrival of Apple Silicon changed everything. Since the M1—and even more now with the M4—VoiceOver has never been as fluid or as responsive. The performance boost is staggering. You can feel that the whole OS, including the accessibility layer, finally has the hardware foundation it always needed. This shift alone was enough to keep me on the Mac.

I work extensively in audio—recording, editing, mixing, radio—and in this domain, the Mac is simply unmatched. macOS has a vastly superior audio architecture: no exclusive ASIO mode that suddenly kills all system sound, naturally low latency, no fear of losing output because one app monopolizes the interface, and access to unique tools like those from Rogue Amoeba, which I rely on every single day. Logic Pro and Reaper are significantly more stable and responsive on macOS, and for someone who genuinely works in audio, this difference is enormous. For me, macOS is the only platform that gives a truly reliable and consistent audio experience.

Comparisons with NVDA are common, but they’re rarely complete. NVDA has strengths, absolutely—but it also has many extensions unrelated to accessibility, and it remains a 32-bit application. This causes random freezes, crashes, and slowdowns with modern Windows applications. Navigation on Windows is also far from consistent: some apps require tabbing, others require object navigation, and you often have to guess which method will reveal all the information. People often criticize VoiceOver for being inconsistent, but in daily practice I have found Windows to be the one lacking uniformity. It feels more like a layered system—almost like Android—where everything has to work across countless machine configurations, with results that vary widely.

One aspect that highlights the difference between the two systems is how they behave under heavy CPU load. When I run FFmpeg on my Mac, pushing all CPU cores to 100%, VoiceOver stays remarkably fluid. The system keeps responding, I can keep working, and nothing collapses. Under Windows, doing the exact same thing makes NVDA quickly become hesitant, laggy, or temporarily unresponsive—even if NVDA has nothing to do with the application generating the load. You can sense that process scheduling is less refined, and real-world usability suffers because of it. For my daily workflow, this difference alone is transformative.

There’s also one area where the Mac is absolutely unbeatable for me: the Mail app. I’ve never found, on Windows, any email client—Outlook, Thunderbird, Windows Mail, or anything else—that delivers the same accessibility, clarity, organization, speed, and overall comfort as Apple Mail. Conversations are clean, attachments are handled intuitively, navigation makes sense, and the entire experience feels coherent. It’s the one domain where I have no hesitation whatsoever: Mail on macOS stands miles above anything I’ve used under Windows.

Web navigation can sometimes be better on Windows, depending on the website. For example, Suno or certain sections of my Synology NAS are easier with NVDA. But the reverse is also true: many websites are cleaner, more accessible, and more pleasant to browse with VoiceOver—AppleVis is one of them, for instance. In most cases, when a website is properly developed and respects accessibility standards, VoiceOver performs extremely well. And when a website is poorly built, I don't blame VoiceOver for struggling—no screen reader can compensate for bad markup.

Another major frustration for me is the absence of Screen Recognition on macOS. On iOS, this feature unlocks entire interfaces that would otherwise be unusable. The fact that it still isn’t available on the Mac is, to me, one of the biggest missing pieces of the accessibility ecosystem. Its presence on macOS would solve countless practical issues without depending on third-party developers.

I’ve also often seen people say Apple no longer listens, but that’s not my experience. Apple is far from perfect, but I find them generally attentive. I know for a fact that there are internal channels where advanced users, testers, developers, and sometimes engineers exchange directly. I won’t go into details, because I’m not sure these spaces are meant to be public, nor do I know how accessible they are today, but their existence alone suggests that Apple is not ignoring the accessibility community. They may not move as fast as we would like, but they are not absent.

Regarding everyday tasks, I use Pages, TextEdit, and Notes for writing, and everything works well for me. I code in Python using Smultron, and I rely heavily on the Terminal, which remains one of the most fluid environments in all of macOS—at least as long as no graphical interface tries to take over the terminal window. Nothing is perfect, but everything works well enough for me to be fully productive, and more importantly, comfortable.

I’m not pretending VoiceOver is flawless. I am fully aware that bugs exist, some of them significant, and that experiences vary widely from one user to another. But in my actual life, in my daily workflow, the Mac remains the platform where I am the most efficient, the most confident, and the least frustrated. The combination of Apple Silicon’s raw speed, the stability of macOS, VoiceOver’s responsiveness even under heavy load, the unmatched quality of Mail, the superior audio environment, and the general coherence of the system creates an experience I simply cannot find elsewhere.

I keep a Windows PC for two or three apps I already own there and don’t want to repurchase. But for everything else—for productivity, audio, web browsing, system coherence, comfort, and especially accessibility—the Mac remains my first choice without hesitation. VoiceOver certainly needs improvements, and I hope Apple continues pushing in the right direction. But contrary to what some believe, I don’t think things are collapsing. In fact, despite the bugs, I see a platform that is stronger than ever, especially thanks to Apple Silicon, and I’m convinced macOS will keep improving.

I don't think specific chip changes, like the rumored low-cost MacBook's use of an A-series, rather than M-series, chip will meaningfully affect the macOS accessibility experience.

One possibility, though far from guaranteed, is that improvements could come in macOS 27, as that release is confirmed to strip out old X86 code, and is additionally rumored to focus on quality rather than adding new features. Again, this is not a guarantee, and may even stray into wishful thinking on my part, but thought it noteworthy as a potential glimmer of hope, and could help inform our feedback for the Apple Vision Accessibility Report Card next year.

I do identify with your perspective to some degree as modern Apple hardware is top notch in terms of quality, as for example there's nothing in the prosumer PC space that even comes close to my Mac Studio in general considering the roughly 5100€ that I paid for it. NVIDIA tried something similar with the DGX Spark, but beyond that being as far from the PC roots as any modern Mac, that thing flopped hard so I feel like I dodged a bullet.

As far as software is concerned, I think that the bar is pretty low in terms of quality, since all options are really bad, and I say this as someone who experienced sighted computer use for most of my life. As a company with a legacy of attention to detail, I honestly find it quite a shame for Apple to be compared to anything made by Microsoft and not even come out on top in the general sense, not because Windows has great accessibility itself, but because Microsoft has always been a lot more developer friendly than Apple, which together with their desktop platform completely crushing Apple's in terms of market share, makes it a lot more appealing to target their platform so even if nothing is perfect, the overall user experience is still better on Windows.

As for Apple interacting with developers in terms of accessibility, my experience as someone who has been involved with their developer community since 2011, enrolled into their developer program for just as long, and with actual hardcore experience, some of it public, messing with the accessibility infrastructure on macOS, I am simply not aware of any interactions between Apple and external developers in this regard, and I can guarantee you that I've never been approached by Apple myself. In fact, and as a developer, my experience interacting with Apple is pretty much the same as that of any other developer, I got them to change the default keyboard typing mode during the iOS 7 beta because my vision was already pretty bad at that point and I was already using VoiceOver to input the passcode as the new flat interface was lacking contrast and I had no idea that the typing mode could be changed back then, so I'm actually lucky that they decided to make the change instead of just telling me to RTFM and GTFO, but other than that, most of my feedback has been completely ignored and eventually automatically closed after 5 years.

When I think about why I use Macs, VoiceOver is a very minor term in my equation, in which the most relevant aspect is that I never feel locked out of Apple hardware as a fully independent totally blind individual without anyone sighted readily available to help me change inaccessible firmware settings or recover my computer after accidentally wiping its partition table. Beyond that there's the fact that I have very strong Unix roots, especially Linux, which I ported to a 32-bit Intel StrongARM-based SoC back in 2004, and more recently wrote some bare metal drivers and a highly optimized 3D graphics rasterizer for the Raspberry Pi 4 without any sight so I also have a very strong low level development background on the architecture currently powering all Apple hardware. Then there's the elephant in the room which is the hardware itself that is simply on a league of its own in general terms, and the current generation that is rolling out now may even give specialized vendors like NVIDIA a run for their money.

I agree Apple does care. and does listen.

The problem here is the company culture. They're secretive about absolutely everything, they won't admit they screw up because it gives them negative PR, etc, etc, etc. Apple has done some really interesting things with VoiceOver and macOS within the last few years. Fully accessible Mac remote control and the ability to customize every single VO command are just a couple examples from the last two years.
We don't know what goes on inside the company. We can't directly communicate with the people making critical decisions such as what to add or what bug fixes to prioritize.

I agree Apple does care. and does listen.

Can you provide examples of that? Because I can provide a wealth of examples of the opposite if needed.

And getting worse.