Advice on switching to mac

Hello,
If you are going to be doing mainly word processing than I would suggest sticking with windows. Jaws and NVDA are both much better when it comes to word processing than Voiceover. This is especially true if you are going to be using Office. Office is very accessible on the Mac but voiceover does not do as well as Jaws and NVDA do with the more complex word processing tasks. For example in Word on Windows you can move by headings, tables and even links using Jaws or NVDA. If the previous does not matter to you then Mac is an ok choice. It just really depends on what kinds of word processing tasks you will be performing.

Regards,
Greg WOcher

Hi,
I've been a long time mac user and can safely say that word processing works well on the mac side. I used a combination of text edit and Pages to write stuff while I was in college. Plus, MS word is mostly accessible with VO from what I've heard. Never used it on the mac side yet.
I can safely say that if you are willing to find some work arounds then you should be good to go. Also if you need more mac advice feel free to ask.
Also, I just purchased a new 15 inch MacBook pro with touch bar, and love the thin g. The new keyboard took a little bit to get used to, but everything works wonderfully. I actually love the newer keyboard design better than the older one found on 2012 units as I previously had a mid 2012 MacBook. Be prepared to spend a pretty penny for these machines.

It depends on what you want to do. If you only want to do simple things like write text, spellcheck, check font and other color information, you're fine. The report text attributes command will not give you more advanced information like line spacing, indents, and probably other things I can't think of/never have to use when writing documents. As said earlier, you cannot do things like jump by headings and other elements in documents. The same is true for PDF documents. In fact, PDF files are even worse because you can't use standard Mac commands to navigate. You must interact with the PDF text and read it with the VoiceOver cursor. I wish Apple would improve in these areas. Sadly, I think the Mac will be left behind. VoiceOver hasn't received major enhancements since Lion or Mountain Lion. New bugs are constantly introduced and we must wait a year for a small handful of them to be fixed while no significant improvements are made to the experience. Apple's market is clearly geared to iOs. I suspect it won't be long until the Macintosh is phased out entirely. From what I've read, there isn't a dedicated team working on the Mac operating system anymore. They're spread across all the operating systems.

Having said that, I still love my Mac. I just wish it had a higher priority these days. Apple was showing a lot of promise up until the release of Mountain Lion. I'm pretty sure this has to deal with these yearly update cycles. Apple focuses more on the version of VoiceOver included in iOS. This can also be observed in bug fixes through the year. Apple puts a much higher priority on addressing iOS VoiceOver issues and leaves the Mac to rot. In fact, they somehow managed to break the battery indicator in version 12.2 of Sierra. I have no idea how that got past quality control. Fortunately, it was resolved in 10.12.3. From what I heard, this wasn't the case in the past. VoiceOver bugs were quickly resolved within a couple months of the release of Leopard and Snow Leopard.

If you're going to do lots of word processing then stick to your Windows. Voiceover has not been updated for long time ago and improvements in the accessibility of word processing in Pages and TextEdit is are lacking. This goes beyond accessibility of word processing in Mac, it is also about Pages and TextEdit, both word processing applications still lack important features that have been integrated to MSWord for long time ago. Referencing is one example. I am full time user of MacOS, and may one time switch back to Windows, specially with the lack of improvements and with bugs that seem to take long time to be fixed by Apple in terms of accessibility.

As much as I enjoy my 13-inch MacBook Air, I have to agree about .pdf files. Automator supposedly works great for this purpose, but for some reason when I tried to follow along with the audio walkthrough on here I ran into a problem. I'm willing to try it out again though when I have more time. I recently downloaded Acrobat Reader DC and while it works pretty well, it could use some improvement. I've also tried out Capti Voice Narrator but can't quite figure that one out. Pages seems to be pretty nice on my end, but I haven't written anything using it. I've mainly used TextEdit and, more recently, MarsEdit which is a blog editor and works great with VoiceOver.

Hi,
I've started using a combination of DocuScan plus and Finereader our pro on my machine for .pdf files. They both do great, and DocuScan plus allows you to navigate in pdfs like you are in HTML pages, by headings, links, etc.
I've used both pages and text edit for my word processing needs, and both do what I need them to do.

What is accessible and what is productive? Those are different things and getting this difference is key for making your choice.

Many things you cabn do on Mac ** they are accessible. But a few things and counting downwards you can do on Mac in a fast, ´productive and eficient way.

There are many differences between how the assistive technology works on the two platforms: on Windows the accessibility uis exposed on the OS level and screen reader manufacturers implement the screen readers accordingly to their and at the end of the day according to the comunity's will ... specially when we are talking about NVDA. The JAWS screenr eader allows the comunity to change and or ebnhance the product behaviour through scripts that can be distributed tto the comunity and produced by this same comunity.

On Mac OS ... Apple has the control of the system and also of the AT that runs on it. This uses to work amasingly well when the company is interested in maintaining accessibility as the state of the art it used to be but when the company removes focus on that then there is nothing else we outsiders can do because they control everything.
The level of customization and even the documentation of this customization features is pretty small so we have to wait one year to have a tiny hand ful of bugs fixed and a huge hand ful of bugs introduced plus almost no enhancements of the experience of use ... and because the screen reader is almost not customizable at all most part of stuff has to be implemented by the application developpers and not by the screen reader developpers so things become even more hard to be fixed or to be enhanced.

At this time I would not recomend newbies to switch from windows ... if they only want something different to try I would recomend strongly against it but if they are planning on using the mac for productivity and serious work then I would totally recomend against the switch ...

For another reference do check http://mosen.org/saying-goodbye-to-the-mac/ because the article adresses everything I personally