Word on mac

By Marghe02, 26 July, 2024

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Good morning everyone, I am a blind student. I am writing here hoping to find an answer to my question. I am writing my thesis and I am working with multiple Word files. However, once I save them in Word from Pages and then use TextEdit, the previous formatting disappears, and I also need to insert various notes. So, I was wondering if anyone could tell me if Word can somehow be made accessible because I currently don't know how to read the text within a document. Thank you to anyone who can help me, and sorry for my English.

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Comments

By Ollie on Thursday, July 25, 2024 - 16:48

I don't believe opening the word file in text edit will remove the formatting, it just doesn't show it.

May I if you are working in pages, why not stay in pages?

Word is okay, to a point. It has a few issues and doesn't always behave. I'm afraid to say, mac is not a machine for blind professionals in anything but audio based software. You'd do far better with a windows machine.

Saying that, there are ways around it. I use ulysses which is a markdwon editor that makes managing large projects a lot easier. You can work on them and then export based on your own sheet design. Unfortunately, as far as I know, if you load word files into ulysses it will make them plain text and remove the formatting which you'll then have to add in again using markdown.

I'm hoping someone else can chip in here with other advice so you have a range of paths. Word, historically, has been a point of contention on here. It doesn't work well with voiceover and large files either.

By Maldalain on Thursday, July 25, 2024 - 16:48

Yeah TextEdit will break the formatting of documents. I have experiences with the app where I have tables in the original documents, and when they are opened with TextEdit they are automatically converted to plain text.

By roman on Thursday, July 25, 2024 - 16:48

So, I used Word on Mac, and it was good until it stopped reading out what I was typing. The VoiceOver screen reader and typing echo used to work really well. However, after some updates, the Word software no longer allows the voice to echo what I have just typed, rendering the software unusable for me. Does anyone have a solution for this issue?