Hi. I am a blind academic and a new Mac user. My problem is that Microsoft Word is extremely slow with Voiceover on Mac with large documents. I need to read and engage with book long documents which have a few hundred pages. While Mac works alright with smaller documents, it takes for ever to load larger documents. I want to work with multiple book length documents with Word on Mac and I am not being able to do this.
If I try to open these documents with Text Edit or Pages, Voiceover starts reading character by character whenever it encounters a pagebreak. This is very annoying. I would prefer to read paragraph by paragraph instead.
I have tried several other forums and even Apple Accessibility. Nothing has helped.
I have the latest Mac and Office 365 softwares and I use a Mac 14 Pro 2023.
What is the best way to read large Word documents on Mac? And how do I go about addressing the problem on my computer?
Thanks,
Moiz.
By Moiz, 24 February, 2024
Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
Comments
These are long-standing issues. No real fix
As far as I’m aware, these are long-standing issues. There are no real fixes. You might want to try Ulysses. As far as I can tell, it’s the only really truly accessible program for long documents. I of course, invite anyone else to provide worthwhile feedback.
Just Reading?
If you use TextEdit and just want to read, there's always the option of setting up Spoken Content accessibility settings so that you can press a hotkey to get selected text spoken. This is second best, anyway, to using VoiceOver read-to-end (VO and A). If you zoom the window so that it occupies the entire screen, you should be able to read paragraph by paragraph as the text will often fit in the window, or you may have to adjust the font size to make this work.
In general though, as others are saying, rich text editing just isn't a strong suit on Mac, I'm afraid. Any consideration for student use will have to take this into account.
Good luck.
My Experience
I am academic too and I know for sure what you are talking about. Now if it is for reading then you better use book reading app like Voice Dream Reader or Speech Central. Both are good apps with cons and pros, however they are the best solution.
Now if it is for editing and leaving comments for your students, then Pages seems to be the best option here. Annotations do work with MS Word however it is such an awful experience.
PDFs are another problematic issue!
Unless you have what justifies owning a mac, I advise you to switch to Windows.
Scrivener?
It's such a shame that Mac lags behind so much on the accessibility front for academic work. I tried contacting Microsoft with my concerns regarding Word with Voiceover on Mac but they seem least bothered. Apple Accessibility has told me that word processers are not meant for reading and I should either stick to Preview or Apple Books. This does not help since PDF accessibility is also not upto the mark.
I will check out Ulysses, but it is slightly expensive. Has anyone used Scrivener? Many of my sighted colleagues love it although there is a steep learning curve. Also, I am not too sure about its accessibility features.