State of Virtualization App Accessibility on macOS

By Seyoon Choi, 13 July, 2023

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Howdy folks!

I'm looking to get insights on the current state of virtualization apps available on the Mac. I'm officially on Apple silicon with the recent upgrade to the 2023 MacBook Pro with M2 Pro chip. There are development environment requiring Windows, so my options are as follows, we'll touch base on the subject line of this thread later on.

1. bust out my HP laptop running Windows 10, code everything on the development environment, and move that back over to the Mac leveraging Github etc.
2. Invest or setup virtual machine that takes advantage of the power, efficiency and the beauty of one laptop for everything situation, why not unleash the potential of this slick MacBook Pro, rather than having two laptops open.

I've used VMWare Fusion in the past, and that has worked fairly well. I'm not sure as far as the Fusion support on macOS and most importantly running the latest version of Windows that supports beyond OpenGL3.0, since the development environment I'm working with requires hardware GPU acceleration. On the other hand I heard a lot about Parallels desktop, another popular Windows virtualization app on macOS. How's the state of accessibility with Parallels? Accessibility was virtually non-existent the last time I used the app.

Any insights would be really appreciated.

Options

Comments

By Travis Roth on Tuesday, July 25, 2023 - 17:44

The way I understand it only Windows on Arm can be emulated on Mac with silicon. There are screen readers for Windows Arm now, both JAWS and NVDA. But I'd have serious doubts about your Open-GL requirements, so maybe start there and find out if that version of Windows can even do what you need?
I've been told by someone who pays closer attention than I that Parallel is still inaccessible; I don't have firsthand experience.