The Full Screen Dilemma

Full-screen applications live in their own workspaces, which Apple calls just spaces, so in order to access them you need to switch to their respective space. This can be done either manually, by pressing Control+Left/Right, or you can configure it to happen automatically by activating a checkbox in System Settings -> Desktop and Dock -> Mission Control -> When switching to an application, switch to a Space with open windows for the application. Also if you switch to an application that doesn't have any windows in the current space, you can also use its Window menu to open or switch to any of its currently open windows, which will automatically switch you to the right space. Unfortunately VoiceOver doesn't deal with these cases very well, so when a window in a different space becomes active it happily moves its cursor to it even if it's off-screen, realizes that the focused element is not on-screen, and starts announcing that the application doesn't have any windows.

Hi,
I've just tried out to get to that "App xyz has now window" message when dealing with Spaces. However, it didn't appear. What do I need to do to run into this issue?
for me, Spaces have been working quite well so far. Or I'm using them wrong maybe ;)

In order to trigger the application has no windows announcement, you have to be in a space that does not have a window with the specified application, and the application must be active. From my experience this is only possible to accomplish using Command+Tab to switch to a different application without the setting to automatically switch to a space with windows for that application enabled, and you must be in a space that doesn't contain any windows for that application before pressing Command+Tab.

For example, if you make Safari full-screen, it will be moved to its own space, and you will be switched to that space as well, so if you disable the aforementioned setting in System Settings, switch to a space that has no Safari windows, and then use Command+Tab to focus Safari, the VoiceOver cursor will move to the Safari window, which is now off-screen because it's in a different space, so every time you move the cursor or just ask VoiceOver to read the current element in Safari, you will also get the application has no windows announcement.

That's why I probably never bothered to try using spaces or mission control, something just felt off. Thanks for the report.

Yeah I think there's a lot to improve when it comes to the overall usability of Apple's window management, although I've never actually experienced Stage Manager visually so I cannot comment on that.

One thing I never understood is having a menu bar independent of individual application windows. I think Windows (Microsoft's product) has historically done it better by making menus part of the windows themselves, but Chrome does it best with it ellipsis menu that collapses to a tiny button in the corner.

Another thing I never understood is the default behavior of not closing an application when all its windows are closed, as in my opinion that's just not intuitive. I do recall hearing people claim that it was done to prevent exiting the application when the user just wants to close a document and open another, but this has never been a problem, since applications can just choose to remain loaded for a while by simply not exiting immediately, so if they get asked to open a document, they can just spawn a new window without having to reload, otherwise they can just exit after a minute or so. Even the system could do this itself, by keeping the state of the application loaded in memory for a while after its last window is closed so developers wouldn't even have to concern themselves with this detail.

Mission Control, which I never really used even back in my sighted days, is totally pointless. Exposé and Application Exposé were both neat and useful, but Mission Control is completely useless in my opinion, not to mention the <expletive> that it actually is with VoiceOver, and the same applies to Time Machine which is borderline unusable with VoiceOver.

Spaces can be a useful feature if well implemented, and I used them extensively in place of extra monitors on Linux back in my sighted days in Blackbox, Fluxbox, and Compiz. I even remember some window manager implementations conveying the desktop as a huge canvas where windows could be randomly placed and the screen would freely move around that space. The problem is that on macOS they are a poorly thought half-baked solution. One reason why don't use them is because when I Command+Tab I get a list with all the running applications instead of only the applications with windows in the current space, and there's not even a way to achieve the behavior I want so I just use a single space. Also I do recall being slightly annoyed by animations back in my sighted days because they got in the way of productivity. Compiz had that problem with animations too, but at least it had an eye candy novelty value.

The Dock is another user interface gimmick that I never really used even back in my sighted days because Spotlight is a lot more convenient. I think that mapping a single key like Command to launching applications would be a much better way to provide the same functionality that the Dock provides, so pressing command would pop up a temporary menu in the middle of the screen with a scrollable list of applications sorted by usage time, or maybe even something like the Dock but on a circle that would either contain a user-configured set of applications when Command was pressed or the aforementioned scrollable list of all installed applications if Shift+Command were pressed at the same time. The stuff that currently lives in the Menu Extras could also be displayed inside the aforementioned circle, so if the user wanted to read the time all they had to do would be press and hold the command key and the clock would be displayed along with the circular ,menu right in the middle of the screen.

Finally I do think that modern personal computers really need to rethink the concept of users and use the lower level accounting functionality to implement profiles instead. Safari already does that so I have work and personal profiles, but I think this should be done system-wide, not by individual applications. The way I think this could be implemented is by using POSIX groups to segregate between multiple profiles on a single user account, so each user would have its own group, each account in a group would be an individual profile, and switching between profiles would not require a password by default with the exception of ephemeral private profiles. A guest mode could also be implemented as an optional passwordless account that would only support ephemeral private profiles. Applications themselves should be sandboxed using specific account types and maybe even containerized using either virtualization or at least FreeBSD jails that should have also been ported to Darwin instead of the current convoluted Transparency, Consent, and Control solution.

Edited to censor myself after a moderation warning.