Apple Disappoints, As Do Other Companies..

@siobhan since you're in the US, what's stopping you flying to apples headquarters and trying to get in the door to talk to someone? It might be costly but you're clearly passionet about this so go for it!

She is just shy of 3000 miles away. That would be quite a trip just to make a point.

I looked it up, 6 hours isn't so bad, you could get a hotel and stay the night.

I agree with almost all of this but I can see some real utility in the Vision Pro. So many of us blind folks, myself included have a lot of trouble pointing a camera just the right way to get good OCR or AI. I’ve gotten a lot better but I’m still not great. As for the utter absurdity of merely getting a hotel and staying a night for a trip across the Atlantic Ocean … well, keep dreaming my friend.

I'm confused, Siobhan lives in Florida as far as I know so she'd not have to fly over an ocian at all to get to the apple headquarters, it's in america right?

And even if she did, so what?

If you want something done, get it done yourself.

As for it being absurd, it's really not, I didn't say it wouldn't be expencive, it would be, but if you guys care so much, get off of your bums and pay for it to get your point across.

You're an optimist after all, Brad. How sweet.

In all seriousness... Airing frustrations is one of the functions of this site. The fact that there are no easy solutions to having these problems fixed only adds to our grievances. It would be lovely if popping into apple rectified everything. They are aware of the issues, they have been reported, they haven't been fixed. These are the facts. The reasons are up for debate.

I assume this is just another venty post then? The thing is, these don't really go anywhere in the end.

Would it be better for Apple to basically scrap VO and start again. Rather than keep trying to fix old software build from scratch. probably be cheaper. Lets face it people get their cars looked at each year. Depending on the MOT they may have to keep paying out to keep the car going. Eventually, it becomes less economic to keep fixing the car and just buy a new one. Maybe Apple should take that option.

A complete redo of Voiceover would honestly be awesome!

Perhaps they're kind of going to do that if they redo IOS 18, according to a post on here; it won't look anything like IOS 17.

I noticed this... I have just about 7 full months of experience with voiceover on mac. I started my ios jurney in 2012 and over the years I honestly don't have much complaints for voiceover on ios *for my usecase*, but I definitely do for the mac VO version. Although for me, the fact that they added numeth code support for math equation on sonoma although it's criminally late compared to the ios counterpart shows me that they truely *want* to care. My best tip as for now is, especially if you have apple care, reach to the accessibility section for whatever device you own through that interface and have a human to human talk to the ... advisor they called there. This person, as an apple employee, will assure that he/she understands your feedback (if it's politely written and the impacts and concerns are voiced well) and escalate to the appropriate. Yes, voiceover on mac is indeed the most complicated screen reader I've ever used. The biggest problem of it is honestly just the web browsing and how apple suttlely change the web randerer or by an accident of a combination of safari, webkit, and voiceover update that broke things appart. Like Monaco editor for me. You must understand (I do now after this difficult leson) how updating can possibly broke things. Is it advisable to have such structure and a screen reader so tied to the os? No. But apple, is the only company, that has created a full fledged screen reader from the scratch without being at all in the accessibility industry at all. Google just copied with talkback and narrator on windows was a joke of a screen reader until... until windows 10, even 11 actually.
Voiceover is weird in this sence that it is both very customizable and not at all. Default keyboard shortcuts suck. But the trackpad is not just a decoration for once. You can virtually assign anything and everything. My wish is that one day they allow us to combine the modifiers, cmd ctrl shift option... But even now, but for the default without modifiers, we have
up down right left 1 finger, 2, and 3 fingers, with either cmd, option, ctrl, or shift. With the clicks that I forgot as their doc is not clear as to which gesture means what in practice, you have ... quite a lot of options.
The biggest problem is again more the backend of the screen reader and not the various input methods we have. It's how VO gathers and present us (or not) some information.
A very underated feature of VO that is also its biggest flaw is how it doesn't use a virtual buffer for parsing and allowing us to navigate web content. It can give surprisingly good results for *some* websites in *some* situation compared to the windows screen reader out there.
Anyways, I just wanted new comers to actually have something useful to grasp from this post.

of my post above.
On sequoia we can now customize even shortcuts with the modifier(s).

We know VO sucks. So do lot of things in life. I am sure NVDA users would also have certain wishlist of features, certain things they wished NVDA did better. So goes for Jaws.
One point I would like to drive home is that on Windows side, where we have focus-mode/browse-mode etc, it's not really different than what VO users constantly do, interacting with objects. At least on Windows side, we ain't trying to interact with each section of the screen, it's just input-fields. Whereas on VO side, it's like object mode on steroids.
Jumping to sections on Windows is often done with tab/ctrl+tab, f6/shift+f6, etc. But the application has to support that kind of navigation, which many devs won't sadly.
Making these things from scratch in today's world would probably take like millians. It's far easy to just keep fixing, reuse old code. Certainly there would be accessibility improvements, new capabilities unlocked, but Apple ain't doing it unless current one has gone beyond point of saving.
VO is just 1 part of picture, Apple's Accessibility APIs might need more attention if a rework is to be undertaken. And that's like OS level, change, it ain't happening if current one is beyond usability and saving.
We have what we have. Griping about it is certainly important so that issues are brought forward, but it's also important we focus on how to find workarounds etc for existing challenges. Applevis's community is a good resource for that.

I made this original post in march so someone reading this useless rant is well served at the end, and I thank you to add to this. I am both an nvda and a voiceover user so can 100% agree with what you said. And this also brings the point why some people think macos is a mouse centric interface before a keyboard one and the opposite for windows, and your point just adds to it. Though the f6 thing in office apps, among other, is like the content chooser rotor / sidebar, windows spot or vo-j shortcut. I still think that most of the problem we have are because of the transition yet to be complete from the old objective c to the modern high level apis in swift for most things, especially ui.

If ya don't like VoiceOver--or for that matter any given piece of assistive technology--then there's a simple solution to that. Don't use it. Apple employees aren't going to be coming around checking on who is and who isn't using their stuff. Well some might, lol. But my point is simply this. Please don't clutter up this site with complaint after complaint about how Apple doesn't care about accessibility and this or that. Send it to [email protected] , or phone them at (877) 204-3930 . I for one, happen to disagree and I have something else to back that up. Just yesterday my father and I drove out to a nearby Costco to pick up my hearing aids. I've since had the pleasure of using them a bit. Not only do the hearing aids themselves work well, but once they were paired via blue-tooth with my phone a whole section of settings appeared which wasn't there before. So yes, Apple does care a lot about accessibility. They may not always get things exactly right, but I for one have been very impressed with their progress over the years.

I for one am looking forward to using the commands set in Braille Screen Input that is not on android and google, like apple are supposed to be at the cutting edge?

The NFB has had some success in pressuring Apple to improve accessibility.

Aside from that, I'd suggest that if you want improved accessibility, one of the best ways to do that would be to work closely with a small assistive tech company. As someone who works in assistive tech, I can say that one of the biggest problems is getting feedback and sustaining a relationship with users. No matter how well developers understand technology and users, regular feedback is required to make any progress.

Users complain about accessibility bugs in smart phones, and rightly so. Developers face similar problems, especially when accessibility software capability is poorly documented. From past experience writing software and creating other tech products for other industries, I can say that I work at about half my usual pace when developing for iOS, largely because of the skimpy documentation.

Another problem is that much of the tech that large companies are praised for was developed by small companies first. A large company may acquire a smaller company, or they may simply copy a small company's technology and claim it as their own. Then the large company floods marketing channels with their product announcements. The smaller company may have offered better support, or could have been more responsive to user feedback, but the larger company will get all the attention.

Good luck!