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Why I can no longer recommend a Mac to fellow blind computer users

387 points by devinprater 3y ago

devinprater 3y ago
Blog post from Applevis Subtitle: Why I Can No Longer Recommend a Mac to Fellow Blind Computer Users I don't mean to editorialize, the title was just too long for the title box.
- dang 3y ago
  Yup, the limit is 80 chars so it needs to be chopped. In this case the suffix is more informative than the prefix so I've swapped out "We deserve better from Apple" above. Thanks!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fatih-erikli 3y ago
[flagged]
- Almondsetat 3y ago
  Apple is the best brand accessibility wise, unless we are talking about some insignificant niche products
  - fatih-erikli 3y ago
    This is correct. Apple is first when it comes to accessibility. However accessibility isn't invented for the blind.
  - pxc 3y ago
    Accessibility isn't a homogenous, fungible quantity. Calling something 'the best brand accessibility wise' is barely even meaningful, let alone useful. Accessibility is a qualitative issue, and disabled people's needs are varied enough that many accessibility tools are only helpful or usable to a subset of them.
    - Almondsetat 3y ago
      Please take a stroll through Apple's accessibility options and you will see the sheer quantity and variety of them tackling many disabilities. If you actually have any Apple devices, that is
      - Dah00n 3y ago
        So the blind users commenting here saying Apple is not the best are, what, lying? Or maybe you are not the target for those features and could instead listen to both sides of this argument and stay on the sidelines? Apple is not the clear winner (if a winner at all) in the eyes of the people commenting here that use the features discussed. Several are pro Apple but at least as many write long comments about how Linux and Windows are better for them. I think we should listen to these commenters and not just tell others to go away and look at a list of features, with no background to tell if it is good or bad.
      - pxc 3y ago
        I'm visually impaired but still have a lot of vision left, and I can tell you from firsthand experience that this is an area where Apple's approach to accessibility falls down for my use cases because Apple's approach to scaling means that - their maximum font sizes for UIs are small - UI scaling breaks more apps than on other operating systems because Apple emphasizes pixel alignment more than reflowing - the unified menu bar means that app menus swallow up menu bar icons if you scale the UI up at all My mother, who also still has some vision but is already legally blind, is in the process of switching to an iPhone after many years of low-vision Android use, can confirm that iOS has much the same problems, including small maximum font sizes and worse reflowing/cutoff behavior than she saw on Android. She's enjoying the transition overall because she's relying more on TTS than she used to, and also because the person who is training her on phone accessibility features knows iOS better than he knows Android. But for me and my sister, who have the same disease as my mother but whose cases are not as advanced, Apple devices are a worse fit due to their inflexibility with respect to font sizes and reflowing, which makes taking advantage of our remaining vision more cumbersome for us, even though doing so is generally more efficient for us at this point. Apple devices don't have moar accessibility than other devices. They have different accessibility than other devices. Whether they work well will vary for different disabilities, including different presentations or stages of the same condition. And the usability of those accessibility features is also mediated socially by things like what apps or kinds of apps a person needs to use, as well as what training and support happen to be available to them where they live and work. This kind of feature checklist thinking you're doing is a profoundly impractical way of thinking about accessibility needs. Checklists have their place in all this, but accessibility needs in the real world are highly varied and contingent on nitty gritty specifics. That Apple puts considerable resources into accessibility features is great, but it's not like there's a certain 'level' they can reach where there are no more gaps. More crucially, there's no level they can reach where criticism from disabled users is no longer valid or meaningful.
- jitl 3y ago
  There’s so much wrong with your post: - Blind users and other disabled people are often professionals. - Apple is very much a personal computer company. They make iMovie, Photos, Apple TV, Pages, etc for personal end users. If you’ve used some of Apple’s pro apps like Final Cut or Logic, you’d know they can design for pro users - but macOS as a whole is the opposite, getting more simplistic over time as they cater more to consumers. The Mac is a good pro computer IN SPITE of it being designed for consumers. - many people in the blind community are dishonest? Wtf. This just sounds like discrimination to me.
  - fatih-erikli 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - pxc 3y ago
      > as a professional in the IT industry, my recommendation to the my colleagues, don't fall for someone if they say they have a disability and demand something. It's not our concern. Supplying your end users the tools they need to do their work is absolutely your job. What do you even mean?
      - fatih-erikli 3y ago
        [flagged]
    - tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
      Im going to pile on here and implore you as best I can to check your priors here. You are coming across as incredibly rude and unhinged. I’m sorry that a blind person…hurt you at some point? I don’t even know. But your behaviour is frankly unacceptable.
      - fatih-erikli 3y ago
        [flagged]
- upon_drumhead 3y ago
  I'm confused as to your statement. So you're saying blind computer users shouldn't be recommending what they feel works for them to fellow blind computer users? Only people who are getting paid to review should recommend experience? Also, are you saying that blind computer users can't use a wide assortment of computers? I have a buddy who is blind and is a developer and they happen to have a top end MacBook Pro and uses it quite well. I don't think that calling them a -low- user makes any sense at all.
  - fatih-erikli 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - n_sweep 3y ago
      this is an incredibly bizarre prejudice to hold
chrismorgan 3y ago
I was expecting some sort of systemic problem across the operating system, but it seems to be just one specific bug in WebKit—though there is also a link to “our recent post on problems in macOS Sonoma and the replies”, and though it does sound to be a rather debilitating bug for affected users, and though this sort of bug making it to production can be a symptom of systemic problems in the organisation.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  One fault can leave a platform 100% broken.
- callalex 3y ago
  Would you tolerate a machine that just stops working for several minutes randomly all day while screaming at you?
  - McGlockenshire 3y ago
    I think you just described compiler output.
  - yosito 3y ago
    This perfectly describes my typical experience using the internet in 2023.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - BlarfMcFlarf 3y ago
    That’s what ads are.
  - str3wer 3y ago
    aren't we already doing that everyday?
- tomxor 3y ago
spacedcowboy 3y ago
I am curious what he's going to recommend instead. AFAIK, Macs are the best out there (by quite some way) for accessibility.
- devinprater 3y ago
  Most of us use Windows.
- shados 3y ago
  Windows with JAWS or NVDA is fairly mainstream, and it's accessibility features are pretty well understood and supported. VoiceOver less so. That only covers one facet of accessibility of course, but they have like 80 percent market share in that segment.
- eddythompson80 3y ago
  Last time I saw a poll of blind CS/engineering students across NA, the wide majority preferred JAWS as a screen reader. That implies Windows.
  - natch 3y ago
    Implies Windows but without information about why Windows was chosen. Sometimes people have to use whatever computer is available. So I take the question more as: given whatever computer platform you are stuck on, what screen reader do you prefer? Feel free to share the poll though, maybe it will clarify.
    - zdragnar 3y ago
      N=1, but the only blind engineer I've worked with preferred Windows, I think for JAWS. The company was a little behind the curve on hardware, but was fairly progressive in a lot of ways, and made accommodations without question, so I know he could have gotten a Mac if he'd wanted one. He even gave a demo to the team at one point of what it was like to navigate editors, screens and browsers as a blind person, starting with the screen reader at a normal speed and ramping it up to what he was accustomed to. I'm a little sad I didn't get to work with him directly outside of a single time he helped me test some custom UI elements, so I don't know much more about his take on voiceover versus jaws, but this was also over a decade ago. I'm sure things have changed more than a little since then.
rock_artist 3y ago
From developer POV this is real frustrating. This seems like something that makes bad experience but at least in the post there are no reproducible steps. Also when a bug shows only sometimes, if it’s rare enough, sometimes it’s really hard to nail down. I guess Apple’s metrics are superior to mine. Yet, sometimes just catching an issue is tough. The other complication with Apple is the fact that sometimes it might be needed for multiple teams to fix an issue (eg. WebKit, Safari and VoiceOver/Accessibility) so they all have their own apple ways which might not be trivial as a single team fixing an issue. And least, yeah, it might just be prioritization as there are some bugs that are with us for years or even regressions between each OS iteration that stays forever.
- MegaDeKay 3y ago
  That "other complication" should actually be in their favor. Getting an issue fixed can only be more difficult when the various working parts are the responsibility of completely different companies.
alib 3y ago
I’m very sorry to hear about your experience. That really sucks. The fact we have a thriving browser ecosystem has got to count for something though. Could you recommend people use Firefox instead? I have come to respect Apple in recent years for their focus on and promotion of accessibility within the industry. They are leading where others have often abrogated the responsibility to build inclusive products. We should celebrate this. Therefore this headline made me sad. I appreciate sometimes drastic measures are required to persuade those with power to use it to change things, and it does sound like this bug has been around for too long. If Apple are serious about accessibility they need to fix it. I have read that the relentless release cycle at Apple does lead to bugs like this never getting fixed. I hope this post gets upvoted enough that someone with influence sees it, and ensures that this one is different. Good luck!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Dah00n 3y ago
  >They are leading where others have often abrogated the responsibility to build inclusive products. We should celebrate this. What "others" are there except Microsoft Windows and Linux - both also having plenty users here saying that they see those OSes as ahead of Apple? Seems to me that at best Apple is on par, not someone to celebrate above others.
  - alib 3y ago
    Good point! I was thinking about when Google launched their progressive web apps page a few years ago with the Accessibility section marked as ‘coming soon’ – not good enough! I was also thinking about the marketing oomph Apple have put behind innovative accessibility features over the last year or so: https://www.apple.com/accessibility/ https://www.apple.com/accessibility/ It’s great to see a company’s accessibility page being more than a dry statement of conformance with WCAG 2.1. As far as I could tell, they were the first major tech company to take a lead on this. They clearly do need to do more work. As do we all!
miki123211 3y ago
I have been a regular Mac user for over two years (MacBook Air M1) and the issue is far less severe than this person claims. It used to be a much bigger problem around Mac OS 12, but even then, Cmd + option + q (quit and keep windows) would solve it pretty quickly. Voice Over has a lot of issues, but so do Windows screen readers, and as a Mac user, I can at least decide to postpone an accessibility-breaking update, something which Windows doesn't let me do. Such an update was one of the main reasons why I switched OSes.
- devinprater 3y ago
  I'm glad you don't experience this anymore. I wish I could say the same. Of course, I have a 2019 MBP so no M1, and I'm not rich enough to just go out there and buy it when I hear it effects even M2 models. I don't bet an issues that hault productivity that much.
- kccqzy 3y ago
  It's also possible to switch the default so that Cmd + q will quit and keep windows, while Cmd + option + q will quit and discard windows. I like it this way much better. I have it set up for just Safari however.
devinprater 3y ago
I tried using a mac (2019 MBP, 8 GB RAM, 4 Thunderbolt ports) at work. I could create course material in Ulysses. I could manage files and folders with Finder. I could even slowly navigate through Moodle's stupid web interface. But then I had to start using Google Docs, and a Salesforce instance. Google Docs works reasonably well on Windows. I even gave a good enough of a bug report for the orca maintainer to make it more responsive on Linux with chrome. But Mac? I can't even begin to describe how messy it is. VoiceOver goes in and out of the document, the VoiceOver cursor gets stuck on menu items, that kind of messed up, where even if I want to download the document for offline usage, it's just... Frustrating enough for me to throw away the MacBook, not (entirely) literally, and grab the windows machine again. Salesforce is slightly better except when you get to a table of record entries, that table is empty. Simply, nothing there. Luckily, I can use firefox to get around this. Or I can simply go back to windows and not have any of these problems. The web is snappy again, there is no freezing up or not responding or busy messages, nothing. It, amazingly for Windows, just works. And that's a shame for Apple.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  [flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- OliverKennett 3y ago
  I'd have dumped mac a long time back if it wasn't for ulysses, such a great experience. Microsoft Word on mac is a car crash of accessibility and, like a car crash, there is a dispute over who's fault it is... Apple with voiceover or Microsoft with word. Sadly, no plans for ulysses on windows.
the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
Not blind, I have no experience at all with any of this. However what I found quite impressive was witnessing an Apple Store employee guide a blind person through voice over. That to me implies that Apple at least trains some folks in the stores on accessibility features.
- devinprater 3y ago
  Yep. Sometimes they even hire blind people to do it. There was one at the Apple Store I went to when I first was looking into a Mac. Years later, I heard he left though, moving into another field.
- lproven 3y ago
  Maybe some, maybe now. I would love to believe it was due to my excoriating writeup of the experience a decade ago: https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/18605.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/18605.html That was just shockingly bad treatment, in our opinions (categorically not humble.)
tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
I certainly don’t want to discount from the point this article is making, but as someone with a significant visual impairment, but that is not completely blind, I legitimately can’t imagine using anything that’s not macOS these days. This is coming from someone that grew up using Windows, and had an extensive Linux phase…including Gentoo. Screen readers are a bit of a lightning rod for accessible technology interest, almost entirely because most people have some sort of sick curiosity. “How can someone use a computer so differently to the way that I do!?”. Of course, most of these people stop here, never bothering to try using a screen reader to navigate whatever they’re making. They might open VoiceOver, realise they don’t know how to intuitively use it, and fumble around with trying to close it again. This tends to have the effect of sucking any motivation out of the room. Most people won’t then go and meaningfully improve their screen reader experience, but they also won’t think to address any other accessibility shortcomings, especially visual ones, because “blind people use screen readers!” Is the pervasive meme. This is part of why I am all in all so happy with how Apple has been going in this space lately. An obvious result of co-design / consultation, or dare I say it…hiring people with disabilities. Addressing accessibility concerns that the stereotypical SV techie has never even heard of.
- gerdesj 3y ago
  OP is describing a very long standing bug which they describe as: "This “Safari not responding” behaviour when using VoiceOver dramatically impacts ..." OP seems to be happy with the functionality of VoiceOver on Mac but not with the stability of VoiceOver on Mac. You don't mention what actually works for you (on your Mac - you do mention that), only that you disagree with the article.
- Dah00n 3y ago
  So what do you use that is better?
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
thathndude 3y ago
This is an interesting take, and a very salacious headline. I’m a lawyer who represent a number of disabled individuals (including the blind). My clients with vision impairments as all in on Apple products, saying that the accessibility features are head and shoulders above other options.
- hollerith 3y ago
  I switched from MacOS to Linux/Wayland after 10 years on MacOS because it accommodated my vision impairment better. Because I have cataracts, it helps to make everything on the screen bigger. MacOS can do it, but the result is blurry unless the scaling factor is exactly 1 or exactly 2, and choosing 2 reduces the horizontal resolution too much for some web sites. (My monitor is 1080p, so with a scaling factor of 2, the viewport is only 960 pixels wide.) In contrast, Linux/Wayland offers scaling factors 1.0, 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, 2.0 and 2.25. (I've been using 1.75 for months.) Windows works similarly to Linux/Wayland (though apps that have not been updated to work with recent versions of the OS end up blurry), so MacOS is definitely a laggard here.
  - oefrha 3y ago
    > but the result is blurry unless the scaling factor is exactly 1 or exactly 2 I can’t relate. I’ve been using a scaling factor of 1.5 for about a decade now (4K monitor scaled to 2560x1440) and it’s never blurry.
    - hollerith 3y ago
      It is not as sharp as it could be, and someone on this site once commented that he notices the difference (between Mac and Windows, where the software doesn't introduce blurriness) even on his 4K monitor. (You could ask me why if I hate blurriness so much, why am I still using a 1080p monitor. My answer is my high-DPI monitor is coming soon.)
      - oefrha 3y ago
        Sounds more like personal preference than something objective. Windows’ 1.5 scaling on the same monitor looks pretty bad to me (font hinting in particular, legibility isn’t great).
mltony 3y ago
Blind developer here. I could never recommend VoiceOver on MacOS to anyone. 10 years ago before I lost my eyesight I was a huge fan of Apple - everything was just working so much smoother than in Windows world. And much more visually appealing. However, after losing eyesight, I had to switch to Windows. I learned VoiceOver on Mac at first, but working with it was so unbearably frustrating,, even back in 2016 when I was trying. Here are some of my complaints that I still remember: * Many actions work every other time. I remember that interacting with text area of terminal app was especially painful since the sequence of commands was non-deterministic. * Hierarchical navigation model is more cumbersome than flat navigation on Windows. In XCode to access some project settings you need to interact with some panel, which has two horizontal subpanels, so you need to interact with the right one, which in turn has two more vertical subpanels, you interact with the bottom one, which has three more subpanels... The recursion depth was 9 levels, I kid you not; and making a single mistake will lead you to wrong place. * Searching webpage in a foreign language doesn't work. Because Command+F needs to be presssed in English layout and this would open VoiceOver search window, where switching to another layout doesn't work. * No easy way to open a link in another tab in browser - as opposed to Control+Enter on Windows. * Too difficult keystrokes - I remember one of keystrokes involved 5 keys: Fn+Ctrl+Option+Command+Up/Down. By now I forgot what it means, but I remember that it gave me plumber's disease - pain in my left wrist from having to press too many keys for extended periods of time. I probably forgot a bunch more. Not sure if any of these have been fixed since then. But my general impression was that Apple is not very interested in fixing bugs, but instead, they appear to care a lot about presenting shiny keynote slides every year on WWDC claiming how much they care about accessibility. In Windows world things are considerably better. Jaws is much more convenient to use, even though I've heard many reports of them not willing to fix bugs. NVDA is open source and it is my favorite, since if something doesn't work for me - I just go and fix it myself, but in general things are rarely broken to that extent in NVDA. Also if I remember correctly Jaws and NVDA share about 45% of marketshare in the screenreader world, while VoiceOver is about 10%. So judging from this point alone anyone would be much better learning a Windows screenreader.
- mycall 3y ago
  What is your opinion of iOS VoiceOver and its' rotor?
oooyay 3y ago
Non-sequitur to the article, but are there any good utilities for blind users to use on Linux?
- avtar 3y ago
  Orca is one of the more prominent screen readers on Linux: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/index.html.en https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/index.html.en I used it briefly years ago for some tests but in general I'm guessing NVDA and JAWS on Windows are probably better options.
- devinprater 3y ago
  * BRLTTY for Braille displays/Braille terminals * Fenrir for a userland CLI screen reader * Orca for GUI screen reader and you'll want to start Orca before you start other apps so it can do some magic with accessibility export variables and ATSPI stuff. I don't understand it and I still do the ritual of putting export linux-a11y = 1 in .profile just in case. That's not the exact variable but the list is out there somewhere. * cups-filters for printing to Braille embossers/printers. I think just about every major distro has the embosser drivers now. Linux can even use imagemagick to convert images into Braille graphics. Meanwhile Windows doesn't even come with embosser drivers, let alone printing graphics to them. If only GUI Linux accessibility were better. It's already got a really good base. Braille support for just about any display you have and all. Not very good TTS engines though. Anyway sorry for making this longer than just list of stuff.
Daveman90 3y ago
There is a well known bug in the German TTS adding the Word „Homograph“ before and after each number for about a half year right now. It’s a shame for everyone who depends on that technology.
hayrhotoca 3y ago
If you're not coding, programming, a Mac is just expensive and overkill.
EdSharkey 3y ago
I was worried that making MacOS free with the purchase of Macs would lead to it withering on the vine and/or become a featureitis junkie. Is that the case here? Not enough regular care and cage cleaning? This seems like a DEI class-action lawsuit nightmare in the making.
avipars 3y ago
Apple used to be great at developing good accessibility experiences, especially on their iPhones. (I personally cannot say much about accessibility on macOS as I rarely use it) I think Google and Microsoft are catching up with Android and Windows respectively.

387 points by devinprater 3y ago

Blog post from Applevis Subtitle: Why I Can No Longer Recommend a Mac to Fellow Blind Computer Users I don't mean to editorialize, the title was just too long for the title box.

dang 3y ago
Yup, the limit is 80 chars so it needs to be chopped. In this case the suffix is more informative than the prefix so I've swapped out "We deserve better from Apple" above. Thanks!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

fatih-erikli 3y ago

[flagged]

Almondsetat 3y ago
Apple is the best brand accessibility wise, unless we are talking about some insignificant niche products
- fatih-erikli 3y ago
  This is correct. Apple is first when it comes to accessibility. However accessibility isn't invented for the blind.
- pxc 3y ago
  Accessibility isn't a homogenous, fungible quantity. Calling something 'the best brand accessibility wise' is barely even meaningful, let alone useful. Accessibility is a qualitative issue, and disabled people's needs are varied enough that many accessibility tools are only helpful or usable to a subset of them.
  - Almondsetat 3y ago
    Please take a stroll through Apple's accessibility options and you will see the sheer quantity and variety of them tackling many disabilities. If you actually have any Apple devices, that is
    - Dah00n 3y ago
      So the blind users commenting here saying Apple is not the best are, what, lying? Or maybe you are not the target for those features and could instead listen to both sides of this argument and stay on the sidelines? Apple is not the clear winner (if a winner at all) in the eyes of the people commenting here that use the features discussed. Several are pro Apple but at least as many write long comments about how Linux and Windows are better for them. I think we should listen to these commenters and not just tell others to go away and look at a list of features, with no background to tell if it is good or bad.
    - pxc 3y ago
      I'm visually impaired but still have a lot of vision left, and I can tell you from firsthand experience that this is an area where Apple's approach to accessibility falls down for my use cases because Apple's approach to scaling means that - their maximum font sizes for UIs are small - UI scaling breaks more apps than on other operating systems because Apple emphasizes pixel alignment more than reflowing - the unified menu bar means that app menus swallow up menu bar icons if you scale the UI up at all My mother, who also still has some vision but is already legally blind, is in the process of switching to an iPhone after many years of low-vision Android use, can confirm that iOS has much the same problems, including small maximum font sizes and worse reflowing/cutoff behavior than she saw on Android. She's enjoying the transition overall because she's relying more on TTS than she used to, and also because the person who is training her on phone accessibility features knows iOS better than he knows Android. But for me and my sister, who have the same disease as my mother but whose cases are not as advanced, Apple devices are a worse fit due to their inflexibility with respect to font sizes and reflowing, which makes taking advantage of our remaining vision more cumbersome for us, even though doing so is generally more efficient for us at this point. Apple devices don't have moar accessibility than other devices. They have different accessibility than other devices. Whether they work well will vary for different disabilities, including different presentations or stages of the same condition. And the usability of those accessibility features is also mediated socially by things like what apps or kinds of apps a person needs to use, as well as what training and support happen to be available to them where they live and work. This kind of feature checklist thinking you're doing is a profoundly impractical way of thinking about accessibility needs. Checklists have their place in all this, but accessibility needs in the real world are highly varied and contingent on nitty gritty specifics. That Apple puts considerable resources into accessibility features is great, but it's not like there's a certain 'level' they can reach where there are no more gaps. More crucially, there's no level they can reach where criticism from disabled users is no longer valid or meaningful.
jitl 3y ago
There’s so much wrong with your post: - Blind users and other disabled people are often professionals. - Apple is very much a personal computer company. They make iMovie, Photos, Apple TV, Pages, etc for personal end users. If you’ve used some of Apple’s pro apps like Final Cut or Logic, you’d know they can design for pro users - but macOS as a whole is the opposite, getting more simplistic over time as they cater more to consumers. The Mac is a good pro computer IN SPITE of it being designed for consumers. - many people in the blind community are dishonest? Wtf. This just sounds like discrimination to me.
- fatih-erikli 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - pxc 3y ago
    > as a professional in the IT industry, my recommendation to the my colleagues, don't fall for someone if they say they have a disability and demand something. It's not our concern. Supplying your end users the tools they need to do their work is absolutely your job. What do you even mean?
    - fatih-erikli 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
    Im going to pile on here and implore you as best I can to check your priors here. You are coming across as incredibly rude and unhinged. I’m sorry that a blind person…hurt you at some point? I don’t even know. But your behaviour is frankly unacceptable.
    - fatih-erikli 3y ago
      [flagged]
upon_drumhead 3y ago
I'm confused as to your statement. So you're saying blind computer users shouldn't be recommending what they feel works for them to fellow blind computer users? Only people who are getting paid to review should recommend experience? Also, are you saying that blind computer users can't use a wide assortment of computers? I have a buddy who is blind and is a developer and they happen to have a top end MacBook Pro and uses it quite well. I don't think that calling them a -low- user makes any sense at all.
- fatih-erikli 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - n_sweep 3y ago
    this is an incredibly bizarre prejudice to hold

chrismorgan 3y ago

I was expecting some sort of systemic problem across the operating system, but it seems to be just one specific bug in WebKit—though there is also a link to “our recent post on problems in macOS Sonoma and the replies”, and though it does sound to be a rather debilitating bug for affected users, and though this sort of bug making it to production can be a symptom of systemic problems in the organisation.

PaulHoule 3y ago
One fault can leave a platform 100% broken.
callalex 3y ago
Would you tolerate a machine that just stops working for several minutes randomly all day while screaming at you?
- McGlockenshire 3y ago
  I think you just described compiler output.
- yosito 3y ago
  This perfectly describes my typical experience using the internet in 2023.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- BlarfMcFlarf 3y ago
  That’s what ads are.
- str3wer 3y ago
  aren't we already doing that everyday?
tomxor 3y ago

spacedcowboy 3y ago

I am curious what he's going to recommend instead. AFAIK, Macs are the best out there (by quite some way) for accessibility.

devinprater 3y ago
Most of us use Windows.
shados 3y ago
Windows with JAWS or NVDA is fairly mainstream, and it's accessibility features are pretty well understood and supported. VoiceOver less so. That only covers one facet of accessibility of course, but they have like 80 percent market share in that segment.
eddythompson80 3y ago
Last time I saw a poll of blind CS/engineering students across NA, the wide majority preferred JAWS as a screen reader. That implies Windows.
- natch 3y ago
  Implies Windows but without information about why Windows was chosen. Sometimes people have to use whatever computer is available. So I take the question more as: given whatever computer platform you are stuck on, what screen reader do you prefer? Feel free to share the poll though, maybe it will clarify.
  - zdragnar 3y ago
    N=1, but the only blind engineer I've worked with preferred Windows, I think for JAWS. The company was a little behind the curve on hardware, but was fairly progressive in a lot of ways, and made accommodations without question, so I know he could have gotten a Mac if he'd wanted one. He even gave a demo to the team at one point of what it was like to navigate editors, screens and browsers as a blind person, starting with the screen reader at a normal speed and ramping it up to what he was accustomed to. I'm a little sad I didn't get to work with him directly outside of a single time he helped me test some custom UI elements, so I don't know much more about his take on voiceover versus jaws, but this was also over a decade ago. I'm sure things have changed more than a little since then.

rock_artist 3y ago

From developer POV this is real frustrating. This seems like something that makes bad experience but at least in the post there are no reproducible steps. Also when a bug shows only sometimes, if it’s rare enough, sometimes it’s really hard to nail down. I guess Apple’s metrics are superior to mine. Yet, sometimes just catching an issue is tough. The other complication with Apple is the fact that sometimes it might be needed for multiple teams to fix an issue (eg. WebKit, Safari and VoiceOver/Accessibility) so they all have their own apple ways which might not be trivial as a single team fixing an issue. And least, yeah, it might just be prioritization as there are some bugs that are with us for years or even regressions between each OS iteration that stays forever.

MegaDeKay 3y ago
That "other complication" should actually be in their favor. Getting an issue fixed can only be more difficult when the various working parts are the responsibility of completely different companies.

alib 3y ago

I’m very sorry to hear about your experience. That really sucks. The fact we have a thriving browser ecosystem has got to count for something though. Could you recommend people use Firefox instead? I have come to respect Apple in recent years for their focus on and promotion of accessibility within the industry. They are leading where others have often abrogated the responsibility to build inclusive products. We should celebrate this. Therefore this headline made me sad. I appreciate sometimes drastic measures are required to persuade those with power to use it to change things, and it does sound like this bug has been around for too long. If Apple are serious about accessibility they need to fix it. I have read that the relentless release cycle at Apple does lead to bugs like this never getting fixed. I hope this post gets upvoted enough that someone with influence sees it, and ensures that this one is different. Good luck!

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Dah00n 3y ago
>They are leading where others have often abrogated the responsibility to build inclusive products. We should celebrate this. What "others" are there except Microsoft Windows and Linux - both also having plenty users here saying that they see those OSes as ahead of Apple? Seems to me that at best Apple is on par, not someone to celebrate above others.
- alib 3y ago
  Good point! I was thinking about when Google launched their progressive web apps page a few years ago with the Accessibility section marked as ‘coming soon’ – not good enough! I was also thinking about the marketing oomph Apple have put behind innovative accessibility features over the last year or so: https://www.apple.com/accessibility/ https://www.apple.com/accessibility/ It’s great to see a company’s accessibility page being more than a dry statement of conformance with WCAG 2.1. As far as I could tell, they were the first major tech company to take a lead on this. They clearly do need to do more work. As do we all!

miki123211 3y ago

I have been a regular Mac user for over two years (MacBook Air M1) and the issue is far less severe than this person claims. It used to be a much bigger problem around Mac OS 12, but even then, Cmd + option + q (quit and keep windows) would solve it pretty quickly. Voice Over has a lot of issues, but so do Windows screen readers, and as a Mac user, I can at least decide to postpone an accessibility-breaking update, something which Windows doesn't let me do. Such an update was one of the main reasons why I switched OSes.

devinprater 3y ago
I'm glad you don't experience this anymore. I wish I could say the same. Of course, I have a 2019 MBP so no M1, and I'm not rich enough to just go out there and buy it when I hear it effects even M2 models. I don't bet an issues that hault productivity that much.
kccqzy 3y ago
It's also possible to switch the default so that Cmd + q will quit and keep windows, while Cmd + option + q will quit and discard windows. I like it this way much better. I have it set up for just Safari however.

devinprater 3y ago

I tried using a mac (2019 MBP, 8 GB RAM, 4 Thunderbolt ports) at work. I could create course material in Ulysses. I could manage files and folders with Finder. I could even slowly navigate through Moodle's stupid web interface. But then I had to start using Google Docs, and a Salesforce instance. Google Docs works reasonably well on Windows. I even gave a good enough of a bug report for the orca maintainer to make it more responsive on Linux with chrome. But Mac? I can't even begin to describe how messy it is. VoiceOver goes in and out of the document, the VoiceOver cursor gets stuck on menu items, that kind of messed up, where even if I want to download the document for offline usage, it's just... Frustrating enough for me to throw away the MacBook, not (entirely) literally, and grab the windows machine again. Salesforce is slightly better except when you get to a table of record entries, that table is empty. Simply, nothing there. Luckily, I can use firefox to get around this. Or I can simply go back to windows and not have any of these problems. The web is snappy again, there is no freezing up or not responding or busy messages, nothing. It, amazingly for Windows, just works. And that's a shame for Apple.

KennyBlanken 3y ago
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OliverKennett 3y ago
I'd have dumped mac a long time back if it wasn't for ulysses, such a great experience. Microsoft Word on mac is a car crash of accessibility and, like a car crash, there is a dispute over who's fault it is... Apple with voiceover or Microsoft with word. Sadly, no plans for ulysses on windows.

the_mitsuhiko 3y ago

Not blind, I have no experience at all with any of this. However what I found quite impressive was witnessing an Apple Store employee guide a blind person through voice over. That to me implies that Apple at least trains some folks in the stores on accessibility features.

devinprater 3y ago
Yep. Sometimes they even hire blind people to do it. There was one at the Apple Store I went to when I first was looking into a Mac. Years later, I heard he left though, moving into another field.
lproven 3y ago
Maybe some, maybe now. I would love to believe it was due to my excoriating writeup of the experience a decade ago: https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/18605.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/18605.html That was just shockingly bad treatment, in our opinions (categorically not humble.)

tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago

I certainly don’t want to discount from the point this article is making, but as someone with a significant visual impairment, but that is not completely blind, I legitimately can’t imagine using anything that’s not macOS these days. This is coming from someone that grew up using Windows, and had an extensive Linux phase…including Gentoo. Screen readers are a bit of a lightning rod for accessible technology interest, almost entirely because most people have some sort of sick curiosity. “How can someone use a computer so differently to the way that I do!?”. Of course, most of these people stop here, never bothering to try using a screen reader to navigate whatever they’re making. They might open VoiceOver, realise they don’t know how to intuitively use it, and fumble around with trying to close it again. This tends to have the effect of sucking any motivation out of the room. Most people won’t then go and meaningfully improve their screen reader experience, but they also won’t think to address any other accessibility shortcomings, especially visual ones, because “blind people use screen readers!” Is the pervasive meme. This is part of why I am all in all so happy with how Apple has been going in this space lately. An obvious result of co-design / consultation, or dare I say it…hiring people with disabilities. Addressing accessibility concerns that the stereotypical SV techie has never even heard of.

gerdesj 3y ago
OP is describing a very long standing bug which they describe as: "This “Safari not responding” behaviour when using VoiceOver dramatically impacts ..." OP seems to be happy with the functionality of VoiceOver on Mac but not with the stability of VoiceOver on Mac. You don't mention what actually works for you (on your Mac - you do mention that), only that you disagree with the article.
Dah00n 3y ago
So what do you use that is better?

aaron695 3y ago

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thathndude 3y ago

This is an interesting take, and a very salacious headline. I’m a lawyer who represent a number of disabled individuals (including the blind). My clients with vision impairments as all in on Apple products, saying that the accessibility features are head and shoulders above other options.

hollerith 3y ago
I switched from MacOS to Linux/Wayland after 10 years on MacOS because it accommodated my vision impairment better. Because I have cataracts, it helps to make everything on the screen bigger. MacOS can do it, but the result is blurry unless the scaling factor is exactly 1 or exactly 2, and choosing 2 reduces the horizontal resolution too much for some web sites. (My monitor is 1080p, so with a scaling factor of 2, the viewport is only 960 pixels wide.) In contrast, Linux/Wayland offers scaling factors 1.0, 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, 2.0 and 2.25. (I've been using 1.75 for months.) Windows works similarly to Linux/Wayland (though apps that have not been updated to work with recent versions of the OS end up blurry), so MacOS is definitely a laggard here.
- oefrha 3y ago
  > but the result is blurry unless the scaling factor is exactly 1 or exactly 2 I can’t relate. I’ve been using a scaling factor of 1.5 for about a decade now (4K monitor scaled to 2560x1440) and it’s never blurry.
  - hollerith 3y ago
    It is not as sharp as it could be, and someone on this site once commented that he notices the difference (between Mac and Windows, where the software doesn't introduce blurriness) even on his 4K monitor. (You could ask me why if I hate blurriness so much, why am I still using a 1080p monitor. My answer is my high-DPI monitor is coming soon.)
    - oefrha 3y ago
      Sounds more like personal preference than something objective. Windows’ 1.5 scaling on the same monitor looks pretty bad to me (font hinting in particular, legibility isn’t great).

mltony 3y ago

Blind developer here. I could never recommend VoiceOver on MacOS to anyone. 10 years ago before I lost my eyesight I was a huge fan of Apple - everything was just working so much smoother than in Windows world. And much more visually appealing. However, after losing eyesight, I had to switch to Windows. I learned VoiceOver on Mac at first, but working with it was so unbearably frustrating,, even back in 2016 when I was trying. Here are some of my complaints that I still remember: * Many actions work every other time. I remember that interacting with text area of terminal app was especially painful since the sequence of commands was non-deterministic. * Hierarchical navigation model is more cumbersome than flat navigation on Windows. In XCode to access some project settings you need to interact with some panel, which has two horizontal subpanels, so you need to interact with the right one, which in turn has two more vertical subpanels, you interact with the bottom one, which has three more subpanels... The recursion depth was 9 levels, I kid you not; and making a single mistake will lead you to wrong place. * Searching webpage in a foreign language doesn't work. Because Command+F needs to be presssed in English layout and this would open VoiceOver search window, where switching to another layout doesn't work. * No easy way to open a link in another tab in browser - as opposed to Control+Enter on Windows. * Too difficult keystrokes - I remember one of keystrokes involved 5 keys: Fn+Ctrl+Option+Command+Up/Down. By now I forgot what it means, but I remember that it gave me plumber's disease - pain in my left wrist from having to press too many keys for extended periods of time. I probably forgot a bunch more. Not sure if any of these have been fixed since then. But my general impression was that Apple is not very interested in fixing bugs, but instead, they appear to care a lot about presenting shiny keynote slides every year on WWDC claiming how much they care about accessibility. In Windows world things are considerably better. Jaws is much more convenient to use, even though I've heard many reports of them not willing to fix bugs. NVDA is open source and it is my favorite, since if something doesn't work for me - I just go and fix it myself, but in general things are rarely broken to that extent in NVDA. Also if I remember correctly Jaws and NVDA share about 45% of marketshare in the screenreader world, while VoiceOver is about 10%. So judging from this point alone anyone would be much better learning a Windows screenreader.

mycall 3y ago
What is your opinion of iOS VoiceOver and its' rotor?

oooyay 3y ago

Non-sequitur to the article, but are there any good utilities for blind users to use on Linux?

avtar 3y ago
Orca is one of the more prominent screen readers on Linux: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/index.html.en https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/index.html.en I used it briefly years ago for some tests but in general I'm guessing NVDA and JAWS on Windows are probably better options.
devinprater 3y ago
* BRLTTY for Braille displays/Braille terminals * Fenrir for a userland CLI screen reader * Orca for GUI screen reader and you'll want to start Orca before you start other apps so it can do some magic with accessibility export variables and ATSPI stuff. I don't understand it and I still do the ritual of putting export linux-a11y = 1 in .profile just in case. That's not the exact variable but the list is out there somewhere. * cups-filters for printing to Braille embossers/printers. I think just about every major distro has the embosser drivers now. Linux can even use imagemagick to convert images into Braille graphics. Meanwhile Windows doesn't even come with embosser drivers, let alone printing graphics to them. If only GUI Linux accessibility were better. It's already got a really good base. Braille support for just about any display you have and all. Not very good TTS engines though. Anyway sorry for making this longer than just list of stuff.

Daveman90 3y ago

There is a well known bug in the German TTS adding the Word „Homograph“ before and after each number for about a half year right now. It’s a shame for everyone who depends on that technology.

hayrhotoca 3y ago

If you're not coding, programming, a Mac is just expensive and overkill.

EdSharkey 3y ago

I was worried that making MacOS free with the purchase of Macs would lead to it withering on the vine and/or become a featureitis junkie. Is that the case here? Not enough regular care and cage cleaning? This seems like a DEI class-action lawsuit nightmare in the making.

avipars 3y ago

Apple used to be great at developing good accessibility experiences, especially on their iPhones. (I personally cannot say much about accessibility on macOS as I rarely use it) I think Google and Microsoft are catching up with Android and Windows respectively.