Text editing on the Mac is a total disaster. Discuss

I dumped my mac partly due to these issues. Some are present on iPhone with a bunch of new ones for extra fun. It’s really sad to see how far apple accessiblity is falling, not least because we’ve bought these devices to improve our lives and often they manage to make them worse. Apple just don’t seem motivated to fix ongoing issues and it’s definitely not because they don’t know which means it’s at best negligent and possibly even intentional.

Unfortunately electronic devices are essential to have a complete life these days so it’s not like you can just swear off electronic devices for a better life. They are essential but lacking. That means by definition we are even further disadvantaged. On the plus side though, Apple get to make nice ads.

The only of these specific issues I have had is up and down moving by character but that happens so seldom as to make in inconsequential. I am still on Big Sur and perhaps that is why I am not experiencing most of these issues. Did most of these issues appear subsequent to Big Sur?

I haven't experienced these issues, but the last version I have access to is Big Sur. If Apple has allowed the experience to deteriorate in just a couple years, that is truly sad. I agree, it's getting harder to recommend a Mac for blind users. VoiceOver has lots of potential to be a great screen reader, but no one at Apple seems to take our reports and suggestions for improvement seriously.

I haven't encountered any of these issues either. However, I'm generally using native Mac apps, not Electron apps. Can you reproduce the problems in, for example, TextMate or Cot Editor?
I'm running an M1 Pro-based Mac, although I'm not confident that makes much of a difference.

Do these apps you mention have any advantage over Text Edit and Pages? They work really well. some of what you are describing though have to do with the position of the Cursor and where VO thinks you are. what about setting VO to ignore the mouse cursor? I'm sorry yu are having problems with accessibility in general, As a Windows user as well, In my opinion, I find some websites more accessible with VO then I do Jaws. Usually, Safari issues stem from either an older system or not enough Ram.

I only really have these issues with web based apps such as vscode. Which is why I'm using textmate.

I'm also not experiencing most of these issues on my M2 MacBook Air, however I don't use Electron apps, which makes me wonder if perhaps there are issues with that framework or how VoiceOver interacts with apps based on it. Regarding activities and punctuation groups, I don't use either of those features enough to determine whether or not they're working correctly on my Mac.

You could install Emacs and Emacspeak. I don't know how well the Mac OS speech server works, however, as I run Emacspeak under Linux. The speech interface is the best available, in my opinion.

In general, and unlike on Windows, it's a sad fact of life that, unless specific work has been done, the best results on macOS will be in apps that use native AppKit widgets. So, not the web, Electron, Java, not even, if we're honest, Apple's own Catalyst. Certainly not GTK, QT or TK. It is in large part a consequence of the way that the accessibility "protocols" are used, imperfectly if at all, from other languages that don't interact with the Objective-C runtime. It's another example of the all-or-nothing tendency of Apple platforms generally, I'm afraid, and accessibility is a casualty. It's also something you have to deal with and anticipate when choosing platforms. Never have I seen these discussions reach such fever pitch of despair than until recently, though. A reckonning, I suspect.

It was a bug in Chromium. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/144791

hi,
I have come across some of these issues as well.
One that I want to add is the inability to use tables within pages or text edit. it doesn't even let me enter them, just bounces back to the control it self.
the issue where it won't speak in a pycharm document may be fixed by jumping to the project explorer and back, if I am right. at least that's the case within php storm, developed by the same people. It is quite sad to be honest, the state Mac VoiceOver is in.

hi,
I have seen the commas issue pop up a few times too, VoiceOver will say comma where there is none, instead of a brace or a parren. usually if there is a bracket and a brace together on one line so ]} without a semicolon to close.
I know these are mostly coding related, but can be quite annoying to deal with.
Something which is happening to me now is VoiceOver completely freezing and falling behind my. typing speed, I have to wait for it to catch up before I can use it again. This is in this comment box.

Hi guys,I have written this a lot of times in various different ways and in other similar topics, but the idea has been the same, macOS is not good when talking about formatting text with voiceover.
My job as a lawyer has a lot of brief making and formatting documents without much design but simple text tools.
I’m the owner of an iPhone since 2010, an ipad since 2014, and an MacBook Air since 2019 until 5 days ago.
Since the beginning my experience with voiceover vs JAWS was a whole world of differences while talking about editing text.
I will state some of the main issues I found either with pages or MS Word.
While trying to select text, voiceover doesn’t say anything through the words selected, so I never knew what I was selecting.
Voiceover never confirms if I’m centering text, justifying it or whatever style I apply with the corresponding keystroke, while JAWS always says if I’m applying or not the style.
While navegating through paragraphs, voiceover only reads the first line of each one of them,, not the whole paragraph, it also does the same while selecting a whole paragraph.

For me these few thing s made a nightmare when using macOS in my job, so I ended installing windows through bootcamp, but having another OS installed is not the best experience for anyone of them.

I have to say I’m frustrated because I can’t understand why an awesome company has this basic awful problems in such basics tasks when they have developed beautiful accessible products in other areas.

From talking with other past macOS users, I can deduce that the people that doesn’t encounter this issues are those that doesn’t have to format texts 8 hours a day

Best regards for all, and I hope apple some day could fix these problems to make me buy an macbook again.

2018 Intel Mac Mini. After 30 years, I no longer code, but I write a lot of prose fiction with Scrivener, Pages, and Google Docs. I'm currently editing an anthology of short fiction. I haven't encountered any Mac issues that might place my writing projects in jeopardy.

I think you posted as markdown, so the left and right brackets were deleted in the conversion to HTML. Here it is again:

[0]

This reads correctly for me. Left bracket, zero, right bracket.

I encounter the arrow key issue occasionally, in which Left and Right Arrow decide to jump by word rather than character. I consider it a minor annoyance, but wish Apple would fix it. I don't have any problems reading or selecting by paragraph, as others have described.

I'm sure that I adapt to the quirks of whatever app I'm using. I know, for example, that VO+A in Pages stops reading after each page, requiring me to press VO+A again to read each subsequent page. I know that VO+A doesn't work at all in Google Docs, and there is no Docs equivalent command, as far as I know.

Do I wish things were better on Mac? Of course. I wish VoiceOver wouldn't add an implicit period at the end of a paragraph. Try it yourself. Delete the period at the end of the last sentence of a paragraph, and notice VoiceOver reads it as if the period were present. That makes editing a real challenge. Another wish: I'd love for VoiceOver to provide some mechanism for blind persons to identify errors in capitalization. Sighted people do this with a glance, but our only option is to arrow through the text a character at a time. That's a Herculean task for a 70k-word novel. A command to jump to next or previous capital letter not at the start of a sentence would help immensely. Bonus points if it skips proper names.

I do believe my editing experience might be better on a Windows 11 system with JAWS or NVDA. Most of my fiction-writing friends are Windows users. But I'd have to give up Scrivener, as my blind writer friends all tell me Scrivener isn't accessible on Windows. For better or worse, I'll stick with the Mac.

Mr Grieves,
Your mention of VoiceOver settings got me thinking, particularly as there are a wide variety of bugs, and manifestations of those bugs, in VoiceOver and macOS, which I suspect is why it has long been difficult for Apple to identify, diagnose, and promptly fix them. When you report bugs to Apple, have you tried exporting your VoiceOver settings and attaching the file to your report? I'd imagine if they could see your settings, possibly in addition to any theories you may have as to the cause of an issue, it would be easier for them to prioritize and resolve it.

I don't know exactly how they triage and prioritize bug reports, but I'd imagine the more information they have about a given bug, particularly one whose specific manifestation is heavily dependent on someone's individual use case, the more incentive they'd have to fix it.

Unfortunately I do have almost all of them, and they keep driving me mad every single excruciatingly stressful day of my Masters. I had been using a 10 year old Mac Air, but either I was not that stressful that it didn't frustrate me that much, or because of some new bugs introduced in my new MacBook with the new OS that I really went off the hook sometimes.
I'm using the latest Mac OS on a MacBook 14" M2. Boy how disappointed I was when I was hit with myriad of bugs.
For my study, I have to use Endnote to manage my referencing, and Pages is the only working option since MS Office Words is too sluggish to use. But admittedly Pages is not that much better.
I have been report these bugs to the accessibility email address, but it just felt like stones dropping into the void.
In the 13.1.1 update, there are event some new bugs introduced. The most notable is Voice Over going silent way more often than I could ever remember.
For Pages and Numbers, try reading some tables with merged cells. You will see how ridiculous it reads.
Although I set for VO cursor and system / insert cursor to follow each other, it does so very unreliably. For example right now when I'm typing these comments, I can't even press VO+S to review the sentence I've just typed because the VO cursor is always stuck about one sentence behind the actual insert cursor.
There are so'o'o'o many bugs now I can't even know where to begin. For example:
1. Redundant sounds for style change (verbosity > text > set "when text attributes change" to "play sound): In the same paragraph/line/word, that sound keeps playing for no reason apparently.
Especially with the new 13.1.1 update, what's needed it stop letting me know. Specifically, bolded and italicised texts are no longer notified, either by this setting, or the VO+T command.
2. Erratic cursor movements by word: Except being unable to move to line-end as you described, I find it very annoying the way it moves through words with punctuations too. Just try press option+left/right arrows to move by words where single/double quotation marks, square brackets or parentheses are present. Sometime it move forward passed the punctuation, but sometimes it's stuck backward after the punctuation while it actually reads the word preceding that point.
3. Browsing by headings: In some long texts like a dissertation for instance, well, have fun pressing VO+Command+H to browse quickly through headings. Sometimes VO cursor is stuck somewhere, while some other times it just jumps all the way back to the beginning, while other time still, it cycles around certain pages.

Those are just some bugs that I could think of at the top of my head now. There are so many more that I just don't know how I could report them all to Apple.
Just a "side" fact, I feel like Apple Accessibility has been seriously deteriorated lately. Sometimes I called the line just so that person shoved me to the regular tech support line while obviously it was accessibility assistance was what I needed. Once someone even told me something like "I can't sit here all day, spending all my working hours hearing and compiling bug reports for you. We have so many of them now." I was so mad I thought "so what the f* you are sitting there doing!"

So sorry for such a negative comment guys. Please excuse me if my stress drove me off the chart...

The bug affecting selection in VSCode was a Chromium issue that has now been fixed in the version of Electron included in this month's VSCode release.

I've always used quick nav. What's good about the commander, and how to use? What advantages does it have over quick nav?

I don’t understand at this moment exactly how the pad commander works, but from what I have understand, you need a keyboard with number pad, which reduces the possibility to ue this on a MacBook Air unless you have an extra accessory.

Of course, if your goal is to minimise lift, then you can leave out the numpad, but happily on an Air you have the Trackpad. It is not, of course, nearly as flexible, but for (essentially) one-handed light work it's doable.

Yes it has issues sometimes, but nothing like this.

I've used NVDA for years now and everything works fine, I've hato restart it a couple times and youtube has stopped working but that's more to do with my specs than anything else.

There is YouTube videos on how to use NVDA.

I completely understand, and I've developed on Windows! Times change and beyond a certain point it's just not reasonable to try to reconcile, beyond a certain superficial understanding of the technology, past experience with the current situation. I will say though, don't be ashamed to take advantage of all of the available material, even the JAWS Basic Training material, free on their website, is a great start, albeit that it has an obvious focus toward JAWS. The one I'm reading now though is The Windows Screen Reader Primer, from the Carroll Centre in the US (free of charge but requires registration and the ePub files are for single chapters instead of a single big book, but it's also in MS-Word). It is very good. The National Braille Press in the US also has some nice, easy-to-read copy for a small fee that covers this sort of ground, and honestly, I've enjoyed using them.

But do get that M2 though. If nothing else, you still need a Mac, and you can still run Windows on it in a VM!

One good thing about Windows is that even though there are several different screenreaders available for it, there are a number of universal keyboard shortcuts that can help you start navigating the system. For example, you could start exploring the Windows desktop interface, as well as some built in apps, by simply pressing the Tab and Shift-Tab keys to cycle between the actionable elements, and pressing Enter to click them. You can find more keyboard shortcuts that can greatly augment your use of Windows in this [list from Microsoft.](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-keyboard-shortcuts-3d444b08-3a00-abd6-67da-ecfc07e86b98)

Once your confident with the universal shortcuts, you can then read some or all of the [NVDA user guide,](https://www.nvaccess.org/files/nvda/documentation/userGuide.html?) for instructions specific to that screenreader. This may help you with more advanced Windows use, as well as the best ways to navigate unconventional app interfaces.

HTH

I've not used MS word in ages so can't help you there, sorry again.

There's an app called jarte for windows, but from what I understand adding a table isn't doable, there's also notepadd++ which is meant to be quite good for editing and programming.

In my oppinion as a former JAWS user; if you know jaws shortcuts to navigate windows, NVDA should be very similar.

You can also make it sound like eliquence if you'd like.

If people would like to do that; let me know.

Although it's a bit more work, I'd avoid Parallels because fundamentally it's still an inaccessible app. (Although don't discount VOCR, which is awesome.) You can use VMWare Fusion, or UTM, which are accessible, at the cost of a bit more time spent installing the drivers, which is still a bit fiddly.

Yes, you're right, for navigation, you're essentially back to reliance on the focus. Usually, that's acceptable because the focus is typically where you want it in the application of a particular kind (notepad's or Word's primary focus will be the text area, for instance, or Explorer's the various panes, or Edge's the web view), or it's possible to compensate for the lack of keyboard navigation by other means, like dedicated keyboard shortcuts or menu commands to invoke particular functions. But fundamentally, there is no dedicated way to navigate the UI, or interact with it, except using the system caret. So you'll use the screen reader's review cursors to understand the layout of the screen, possibly to invoke mouse functions, but without the same comprehension of the structure or hierarchy of the controls or direct control over the widgets. I honestly think this is the single biggest draw to the Mac, and is the most noticeable and differentiated aspect of accessibility between the platforms. Naturally, Windows Narrator is now very good for a free and included screen reader, arguably in recent years has brought the Windows approach closer to the Mac, and for most of Windows itself and especially UWP apps is probably the nicest way to interact, but ultimately it's both less necessary and less comprehensive in the much more keyboard-first operating system, particularly when you have aggressively custom screen reader support for particular apps, or virtual document-like presentation of web pages. This has strengths, and it has weaknesses; in my view, both are valuable, but you're going to spend much more of your time learning keyboard shortcuts in Windows than you ever have Mac because discoverability of a UI is something you won't want to do more than once in Windows. How you do that is screen reader dependent, NVDA has review, JAWS has the JAWS cursor, etc. There are commands to read the current window or dialog box, which is usually sufficient to repeat a dialog box, and because of control accelerators (keyboard shortcuts for activating controls in a window, and not merely menu commands), or default actions like Enter for OK and Esc for Cancel, you'll usually be able to interact with simple windows without further review or the need to use Tab at all. But, yeah, the staple of Windows is the tab key. Oh, and the various system-wide shortcuts like Alt-F4 (close application) that you come to learn over time, or from the keyboard shortcuts list linked above in this thread. And I'll be honest, the fact that navigating using the focus is still pretty much the accepted way to navigate in Windows is still pretty horrifying to me, and a big part of my defence of CoiceOver; it really is something you'll notice, a culture shock on your return. Particularly if you're last contact with Windows was XP or Vista, which had much more minimalistic UIs.

Good luck!

It's true that Parallels has the most refined support, yeah. But the problem is the UI of the application itself, which you need VOCR to navigate. If you're up for a challenge, then sure, it's certainly doable. On the other hand, it does cost money, and Fusion Player and UTM are both free.

I just remembered you said you were going to use NVDA, so yes, you will probably learn review and yes you will find that you get used to it and the concept of multiple cursors. However NVDA also has Object Nav, which is similar in some ways to the way VoiceOver does it, albeit limited to simple mouse-click interaction. So if you wanted an overview of an interface, accepting it isn't quite the same because you'll "see" more using that mode than is on screen, but still want to interact with it, that might feel more familiar as well and be easier to learn. However in the end I suspect you'll come to appreciate that the best way to use a keyboard-centric OS is with the keyboard, and yes, it's probably a very big part of the reason that most applications are "intuitive" to use in that way, certainly more so than many of Apple's first-party apps (although, curiously, not many third-party ones).

For the web and web controls and anything that benefits from being rendered by screen readers as virtual (for instance, a lot of the text output by JAWS), you get this virtual buffer motif, a document-like attitude that gives you review much as would be found in a word processor document, like a TextEdit document for instance, except that you can manipulate controls, activate links or buttons, or, after entering the standard mode, possibly automatically or possibly in response to a command, enter and edit text in a text widget. In this mode, single-letter navigation works, much as it does with Quick-Nav enabled and single-letter navigation mode also enabled, so the document is read-only. This will all become plain when you run into it.

It makes me sad that Apple is letting blind Mac users down so badly. Choice is good and we ought to be able to endorse the platform of our choice.

With JAWS and NVDA you use a letter to go forward and the shift key plus that letter to go back. For example, I might press h to go down a heading, and shift h to go back.

You can use the arrow keys, up an down, to read through a page if you like, personally I hardly use the tab key on a webpage if I can help it.

As for tracking two kircers at once, I've never thought of it that way, The object nav really isn't hard once you get used to it, in fact; I'd say it's like the mac.

So with your NVDA key, usually the capslock key held down, you can use numbpad, 2 to interact/drill down, 8 to go back up, 4 to go left, and 6 to go right.

You can also use left clic right click the slash and star keys, and NVDA enter clicks on the thing you're focused on, kind of like a left click I believe.

If you're learning to navigate a UI using NVDA, and are used to VoiceOver on macOS, you'll probably find object navigation fairly intuitive. For me, using a laptop without a numpad, I object navigate by pressing NVDA-Shift-left or right arrow to move around the UI, and interact with elements with NVDA-Shift-Downarrow. With JAWS, I've tried navigating UIs by cycling between the JAWS and PC cursors, but generally prefer NVDA's object navigation model.

The closest to this in JAWS is probably the touch cursor, but that gives even less discretion for hierarchical navigation. Yes, I think NVDA object nav is probably the closest to VO. The problem is, these methods basically use the accessibility model, which isn't the same as the on-screen model, so it sometimes feels a bit dense and quirky. Ultimately you have to use all the tools in the toolbox to figure out what's actually relevant, but I think the good news is you only really have to learn it once, then you can just use normal keyboard commands in most cases. Even the Settings app can be navigated just using normal keyboard commands, with practice.