Did Microsoft Word finally become usable with VoiceOver?

Track changes and comments is my biggest gripe. There's just no effective way to move between the document text and the comment bubble, or quickly accept, reject, or move to next/previous change.

Second gripe is that Word loses your location the second you switch to another app. Come back to word, and your cursor is at the start of page 1.

Google Docs is such a smoother experience.

I had Word on my Mac for a project I worked last year. It was a tedious experience. If I ever need Word again, I'll buy a cheap Windows 11 laptop with NVDA before I'll pay Microsoft money to put it on my Mac.

this is something I'll have to come back to with agents and editors. I would be interested to know how blind professional authors deal with this... Though, to be honest, they probably just use windows.

"...to be honest, they probably just use windows.", write along with Google Docs! 😉✌️

MSWord on my mac becomes unresponsive when I open large documents. By large I do not mean a documents with hundreds of pages, but a fairly large document of 20 pages or so. It becomes unresponsive and when it responds VoiceOver gets very laggy.

Oh yeah, forgot about that one. Not great when you've got a 100 k novel.

Mac is great for blind professional musicians and those who work with audio... For everything else, it's a bit pants.

I'll have to check out google docks. It might be a solution. I know we can read tract comments in pages, but then we have to use pages... Which is pants.

I hope you're right that it's improving, but my most recent experience would suggest it's not there yet.
As long as comments and tracked changes are not truly usable, it's not even an option for me to use it for real work.
I really wish they'd get their act together.
Dave

Of Google Docs, Pages, and MS Word, my experience indicates Google Docs handles large documents the best. I agree that most blind authors are using Windows, where MS Word is fairly usable.

So, the subject most of it. If Office products don't work on Mac, who's u;timately responsible? Is it Apple, for failing to optimize VoiceOver to work with Mac, or is it Microsoft, for failing to adapt their tecnology to the Mac?

Apple couldn't care less if their users can't use Word, and Microsoft is more than happy that Word works flawlessly on Windows. No one has any incentive to change this situation.

There are Windows apologists out there who genuinely believe that IAccessible2 was a conspiracy by IBM and Sun, instead of a functional API that became a de facto standard for communicating rich text to screen readers.

It's true. Vendors are primarily motivated by self-interest. Microsoft has fewer excuses because their software is cross-platform, but ultimately you always have the option of using Windows. And Apple, with its own suite, also has no real reason to accommodate Microsoft, beyond picking up some cheap PR points.

But I think the bigger issue is that VoiceOver on macOS just isn't the priority it needs to be, and that ultimately that just doesn't present a problem for Apple. Complaints about software QA aren't unique to accessibility either; right now, they just don't care, because they're too busy chasing dollars for their investors on the newest and shiniest bandwagon of the tech sector, that is of course AI. I don't think there's any conspiracy here, sadly, only neglect.

Stop development on all accessible technology. In fact, stop development on all technology. Period.
Re-introduced the abacus to the world.
Long live simplicity.
Long live the Abacus!!! 🫡

When I last had a book chapter published, the version that came back from the publisher for review was in a not very accessible PDF format with all of the lines numbered. The publisher's accessibility department managed to provide an HTML version for review, which helped considerably. I submitted the chapter as a LaTeX file. The version returned by the publisher for review didn't include any change tracking. It was simply their edited text, including minor stylistic changes from what I had submitted.

By the time I was invited to review the publisher's changes, the manuscript had already been converted into a proprietary XML format, from which PDF and HTML were automatically generated.

My understanding is that some publishers are more word processor-centric and presumably use change tracking. Often, however, the process is indeed to convert the submitted files into an XML representation that discards most of the formatting information, then to use that for subsequent editing.

To answer the question raised in this thread, in professional publishing contexts, change tracking in a word processor file may not be used at all. It very much depends on the publisher's procedures. If you really need change tracking, Pages is probably your best option on the Mac.

It works on Windows fairly well, and good on Linux as well. I'm starting to think the absolute best solution would be a good fast Mac with Windows in a virtual machine for those times when one really needs to get work done without strangeness creeping in. Since Windows is my first language, I'll just avoid the Mac part of the equation until or unless something comes along that does wonderfully with word and excel files, maybe then I'll reconsider.