Should I switch to Mac? Coming from a student.

I haven't used Jaws in years so can't comment, but there are times where shift-arrows Etc. do not work for NVDA. This is why there's NVDA-f9 and F10 to select and copy text, which is more or less equivalent to VO-enter. As an example, these alternative methods are how you select and copy text in a terminal window, on both operating systems.

Also, all of your stuff about how you found the Mac and Voiceover to be are why I insist that, if at all possible, OP tries a Mac for themselves as extensively as they can. Because I don't find it to be *any* of those things.

Yes, it's *different* from Windows. Yes, text selection could be better/easier, no quibbles there. But like I said, I switched after using Windows for years, and I'm doing just fine. I think it's great to talk about your experience, particularly if you have definite examples. But also realize, which is why I'm harping on this, that your experience, Esp. when it comes to what you find confusing or too slow to use or whatever, won't be everybody else's experience. It's certainly not mine.

Does VO+Ener work anywhere other than Terminal?

And regarding Firefox, I thought I would try using it with Jira and BitBucket and although I've not used it for long, I'm actually really impressed. It has come a long way since I last used it. Navigating a Jira ticket in Chrome just gets slower and slower the further down the headings you get. Firefox seems snappy and so far is working well. So maybe I'm wrong and it is a viable option after all.

Yes, I've been using Firefox and it works really, really well.

And I definitely second spending time with the Mac - Apple has a 14-day return window, so that should provide enough time (+learning from YouTube videos etc) to learn how to use the Mac. I wasn't aware selecting text in Terminal was different, I've never used the F9 and F10 commands personally (but I've also never dealt with Terminal, I'm not a programmer).

At this time, I would recommend staying with Windows, and use a combination of Jaws and NVDA. I primarily use NVDA, and use Jaws in certain situations. VoiceOver integration with the Mac is nice, but I have had some focus and app freezing problems when using VoiceOVer on the Mac. I'm not a heavy Mac user, but one of my friends and co-workers is, and he was a big Mac fan. He has largely switched to using Windows and NVDA because he has encountered many productivity frustrations too.

Windows does offer much more variety in assistive technology software like screen readers and magnifiers. If VoiceOver works with what you want, great. But if it doesn't, there aren't really any other options. In Windows, you have Narrator, NVDA, and Jaws. All have their uses.

If you are already comfortable using Windows and how you navigate using a screen reader there, the Mac is quite a bit different, and will take some learning. I'd also argue that the vast majority of office jobs run in a Windows environment, so it's good to be comfortable with what most of the business world uses. For productivity, I'd definitely stick with Windows.

You also have the Windows version of Be My Eyes, which is also nice. I use that surprisingly more often than I thought I would. Just a few thoughts.

I spoke too soon. Firefox is still not quite there for me.

A few problems. Firstly it says "clickable" when moving VO to a normal piece of text. Chrome did this for a bit after Sequoia but it got fixed. This is really annoying.

But more importantly I've just been finding things that don't work in Firefox but are fine in Chrome and Safari. For example, combo boxes where you can't select any items. Or controls that Firefox just doesn't quite see at all for some reason.

Shame because it is otherwise quite nice. I like the little keywords you can assign to bookmarks, so I can just type "jira" in the bookmarks bar and it takes me to where I need to go.

Anyway, sorry I'm derailing this thread.

I'm totally blind, have 3 Macs, and as I mentioned numerous times in multiple threads on this site, I cannot recommend a Mac to other blind people in good faith. My needs are significantly different from most people's, as I'm a developer, I spend a lot of time alone so don't have anybody to help me tackle any technical issues that might prevent my systems from working which makes Apple's accessible firmwares quite useful, I value Apple's stance on privacy, macOS is significantly more open than Windows as opposed to all other Apple ecosystems so I can tweak and tinker with anything I need, the overall stability of Apple's drivers compared to third-party drivers on Windows means that my systems almost never need to be shut down or rebooted for anything than installing software updates, and Apple hardware is in a league of its own and are also currently the only company in the world that can compete with NVIDIA on cost / benefit when it comes to raw processing power and memory.

The problem with accessibility on the Mac, in my opinion, is not usability or coherence, because the interface provided by VoiceOver is actually quite good at that, and unlike Windows screen-readers, which relegate navigation to the operating system itself by default, VoiceOver provides its own navigation controls that just work the same everywhere except where developers seem to go totally out of their way to prevent that (looking at you, Slack client). The problem with accessibility on the Mac is that it's not considered important for some reason. Apple's view on accessibility is that it's the job of individual applications to adapt to the environment, which is a stance that I totally agree with, but then Apple's own applications fail to lead by example, so in many situations, like in the Mac App Store, you do get accessibility but the navigation is so hierarchical that it just becomes inconvenient to use. Then there's the problem with third-party applications that rely on cross-platform frameworks that either do not use native controls or just fail to configure them properly for accessibility. Finally the browsing experience is just terrible regardless of browser, in some ways due to VoiceOver itself having bugs in its navigation code, but also because even WebKit fails to provide a simple accessibility hierarchy so naturally writing a screen-reader that can abstract away the complexity becomes a real challenge.

The lack of interest in actually maintaining a proper accessibility experience results in negligence, so bugs can linger for years without getting fixed, and sometimes when they are finally tackled, the solution is either incomplete or ends up causing problems elsewhere, which might be a sign of technical debt. The most glaring case of neglect that I keep mentioning on these forums are the accessibility bugs in `NSTextView`: this view provides a fully featured rich text editor, and TextEdit is a first-party application from Apple famous for literally just wrapping `NSTextView` instances in windows. The problem is that `NSTextView` has been broken since at least for 11 years, which is how long I've been blind so I never actually experienced it working properly, but its usefulness means that it's used both by Apple and third-parties almost everywhere so its problems are widespread.

As a seasoned blind developer, there are a few areas in which I can actually be the change, like contributing code to address the many problems in WebKit which is an open framework, providing libraries that people can use to easily abstract away workarounds for accessibility problems in native applications, and building specialized accessibility tools to integrate and augment VoiceOver. However I'm only one person, and besides currently working for someone else I also have my own ideas and projects to work on, so and since despite these problems I can still use macOS, I don't have a real motivation to invest my own time into any of this.

Windows is its fair share of problems too, however it does get text editing and web browsing so right with any screen-reader that users end up taking it for granted and ending up surprised when they face problems with these two fundamental tasks on macOS, plus Microsoft actually invests into their accessibility infrastructure, even making available new applicational interfaces when necessary, whereas on macOS we just get a terribly designed and very poorly documented legacy framework, so no wonder third-parties aren't making screen-readers for the Mac.

For some lists/combo boxes, you have to hit them and then either tab or VO-right to get into the actual set of options. I have a banking site that works like this, e.g. to pick where you're paying from, there's a thing that says "pay from" list/combo, but if you hit VO-space and/or try and interact with it, there are no options. It's almost like hitting VO-space on it brings up a second list/combo with actual options.

I don't know if that happens in Safari or Chrome because I don't use them, well Safari if I have to and maybe Chrome if I get some stuff that uses web midi, because Chrome seems to be the only thing that supports it. But anyway, it's worth keeping in mind to see if that makes any controls work for you that didn't.

Yes, it happens for me on all combo boxes of IA when viewing or adjusting something about my saving plans, on chrome.

Oh, boy. I know I'm procrastinating when I open one of these threads. Advice:
1. Look carefully at the Mac forum to see what issues people are experiencing. I believe you'll find far more posts about problems versus happy posts than you'll find on IOS or Windows.
2. In my personal experience, it doesn't take 14 or 30 days to see if you can use a Mac. I tried it for years... *twice* before finally throwing in the towel. There are neat things about VoiceOver and Mac OS, and it's simpler than JAWS. Quantum physics is simpler than JAWS. But it depends on what you do with the computer, and I think being a student will be particularly rough, though you can see above that it's not so for absolutely everybody.
3. If you're a student, unless things have changed in the few years since I was a professor, you need Microsoft Office: Word, Excel, your prof's powerpoints. A couple of people on here consider at least Word usable, but only a couple. None of the advanced features are accessible, and the fact that each page is a separate "object" makes Word on Mac awful to use. For instance, arrow up to page 1 from page 2 and VoiceOver reads the top of the page, because it's the object, rather than just reading the line you're on. Things go downhill from there. In Excel, VoiceOver can't track column and row headers, so that's out. Nobody accepts Pages or Numbers documents in college. I always kicked back Google Docs, too.
4. TWeb navigation and usage is multiple times faster and more reliable on Windows. Some sites, including purchasing meds for my dog, are only accessible on a PC--not Chrome for Mac, etc. The bizarreness of non-standard combo boxes on Mac has been mentioned.
5. I don't recall Reaper being mentioned in the original post. I don't do audio work anymore and never used many plugins, but OSARA was written by Jamie Tate originally and has some perks on Windows, like the ability pull up an accessible list of all plugin parameters, at least for the plugins I used. Third-party ones are likely hit and miss. I never could get h.264 to work on PC, either.
6. Even when I had a JAWS license, NVDA remained my daily driver, because it's so much simpler. You can find the settings in an instant, and the manual is entirely on one massive well-structured web page.
7. There's no such thing as a really smooth blind computer experience in all respects. Ultimately, it's about what lets you "compute" most effectively.
HTH

“

7. There's no such thing as a really smooth blind computer experience in all respects. Ultimately, it's about what lets you "compute" most effectively.

”

Preach it, Voracious P. Brain !!! ✊😁

Man, I really hate writing a subject for these things.

You will almost definitely need Microsoft Office, no matter which uni degree you go into. Only .docx or .xls files are accepted - maybe PDF. You may also need to deal with really fiddly editing, like you will almost always need to reference and perhaps include a table of contents. And maybe it's just me, but I find Pages and VoiceOver too clunky for that.

Another gripe I have is with Numbers, you manually have to add in say, 1000 rows and columns. The blank template only has so many. I find Excel a horrible, awful experience on Mac, but that's because it was horrible for running my D&D character sheet and other large spreadsheets. Oh, and there's nothing like Control + G (the 'Go To' function) on Numbers.

I am curious though, what do people find so hard about JAWS? I self-taught myself NVDA, I needed some training for JAWS (and Windows keyboard shortcuts) but I didn't find it that hard.

I get the feeling that people become, overwhelmed, with JAWS. There are a ton of functions, and hot keys to learn, especially with a later version of JAWS, but then again, if you use NVDA and a bunch of add-ons, you pretty much get the same outcome.

I dunno, NVDA just seems so much more intuitive to me then JAWS ever did.

//End 2 cents

So, from a former student who got a Mac:

Depends on what you want to do. If you have the patience to learn a new OS, if that kind of thing actually gives you joy, then sure, get a Mac. I would hang on to the Windows machine if I were you, though. Until you nail down the Mac experience, you're going to have to make a conscious effort to toss the Windows logic out of the .. window. And it may never entirely leave; I still occasionally attempt to execute things on the Mac with Windows keyboard commands when I'm not paying attention. Your productivity is going to take a dip, no question, if you have to rely solely on your Mac, and most schools expect you to use Jaws, and their services are tailored to handle that. NVDA is an awesome screen reader, but don't expect the school faculty to know what you're talking about if you bring it up.

Now, if you get a powerful enough Mac with enough hard drive space, you can install a virtual machine. That way you get the best of both worlds. Want to do Mac stuff? Turn on your Mac, poke around, learn the system. Time for school-related projects? Boot up the Virtual machine. Installing Office on it shouldn't present any problems, and my virtual machine runs faster on my Mac than any Windows machine I've ever owned.
So, in summary, if you want a Mac, get a Mac. Just be aware of what you're getting into. I enjoy my Mac, But I'm also something of a tech nerd. Not everyone is; for some people, learning new tech is akin to me and maths when I was in school. Try it out, see for yourself. Ultimately, none of us on the forum can speak to your personal experience. So, if I were you I would take the advice of one forum member who suggested that you pay a visit to your local Apple store and try the Mac for yourself. I didn't have that option; I had to order my machine from abroad, and once it was in my hands I had to commit. If you can, go to the store, try out the Mac and make an informed decision based on your personal experience.

If you have ios and a bluetooth keyboard, you can somewhat, start to get a feeling on how operating a mac is going to be like; to a point. At least for navigating etc, as ios and mac share a large amount of keyboard shortcuts, I'd say its about 90% or so; and also trackpad gestures are the same on ios than on mac, again about 90% or thereabouts; if you want to start getting a feel for things. Of course some things will be different but most things will be the same as far as basic and a little more advanced navigation. Actually if you turn on I think it was grouped navigation on the iphone, that will make the navigation closer to the mac. Of course you can disable grouping navigation on mac, but when you first get it groups will be enabled by default. As said previously though, test it out if you can but you could start familiarizing yourself through ios to make things easier.
Also on a sidenote, if your thinking of running a vm for windows stuff, get at least 16gigs of ram. The more the better of course but, 16 at the least.

I don't get this argument, nvda is a real thing now and not the underground thing it was a decade ago when I started, and yes it's my main sr on windows since then, jaws only for very specific things and fallback.
VO works relatively well with math if that's a requirement for you, mathml and mathjax. I honestly tend to use my mac when I don't need to select text a lot which is a real downside of VO currently, I did full calculus 1 with latek and all that 80% on the mac, with some help of pandoc when necessary.

That makes sense. I find it easiest to practice alongside the Freedom Scientific training videos and podcasts - training documents is too overwhelming. Plus, you don't need to know absolutely everything.

(Slightly off topic but is there an add-on for something like the JAWS Window List?)

That doesn't work for me, at least not in Jira. I suspect they are using non-standard combo boxes as they allow you to type to filter etc. Pressing tab just jumps to the back button in the toolbar. VO+Right just moves away from the combo.

I guess like a lot of these things it depends what you are using it for. Other than the really annoying barrage of clickables it's possible all the other issues I've had are to do with Jira and BitBucket.

Yeah, it's called, "NVDA Global Commands Extension:", and it works by pressing NVDA plus F 11 (once for a list, twice for a list in a virtual window that allows you to close the apps).

https://nvda-addons.org/addon.php?id=138

HGH. :-)

Hi everyone,

Thanks for this incredibly rich and nuanced discussion — I’ve read it all with great interest. That said, I respectfully disagree with some of the more negative takes on macOS and VoiceOver.

I’ve been using macOS for over ten years now, and as a blind user, I actually feel far more comfortable and productive on my Mac than on Windows. VoiceOver has its quirks, sure — but what screen reader doesn’t? What matters most to me is consistency, and I find macOS much more logical and unified across apps. I’ve tried JAWS and NVDA several times (and still use them occasionally when needed), but I always find myself back on macOS for serious work — especially writing and coding.

When it comes to word processing, I don’t rely on Word or Google Docs. I format all my documents in Markdown, which I find elegant, structured, and very efficient with a screen reader. It gives me full control, and the result is perfectly formatted when I export to PDF, HTML, or DOCX using Pandoc or other tools.

That said, I want to highlight that Pages is now very accessible with VoiceOver. I’ve written long documents in it without any issues. So in reality, we have several accessible and effective options on the Mac: Markdown, Pages, Ulysses, and even Word in some cases. Everyone can choose the tool that fits their workflow.

I’ve seen a few comments saying that formatting is “easier” or “more complete” on Windows — but to me, that’s more a matter of habit and tools. Markdown offers a clean structure and excellent accessibility, especially when combined with editors like iA Writer or Typora.

To answer a technical question from earlier in this thread:
Can you use color in Markdown?
Not directly — Markdown is intentionally simple and doesn’t include native support for color or complex styles. However, once you export your Markdown to HTML or PDF, yes, you can absolutely apply custom styles (via CSS or LaTeX, for example) to add color and more advanced formatting. So yes, it’s possible — just not within plain Markdown syntax.

Finally, I think we should stop comparing macOS and Windows by trying to force one into the mental model of the other. If you approach macOS expecting it to behave exactly like Windows, you’ll likely be frustrated. But if you take the time to fully embrace the Mac on its own terms, you might be surprised by how much it allows — and how fluid the experience can be.

Happy to chat if anyone wants to go deeper into Markdown workflows, macOS tips, or screen reader comparisons. In my opinion, the best approach is to seriously try both platforms and see which one fits you, not what the majority says.

Take care,
Mathieu

If you want more control of visual formatting than that offered by Markdown and Pandoc, it's time to try LaTeX.

"brew install mactex" is the easy way to get it if you have Homebrew installed. You can use your preferred text editor, or run TeXShop, which when last I checked was accessible with VoiceOver. (I use other editors; I'm simply trying to be clear about the options.)

Note that LaTeX is used in universities and research institutions for preparing manuscripts, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the discipline.

The new and emerging option is of course Typst, which now even has preliminary HTML support in addition to the ability to produce typeset PDF. (To generate HTML from LaTeX, you need to use external tools such as TeX4HT, Lwarp or LaTeXML. By comparison, Typst promises to include HTML directly as an output format.)

could you send me a private message please would love to chat more.

Both Mac and Windows have their own pros and cons and neither is free from some quirks.

If you are already integrated into one ecosystem, it is probably difficult to change and learn a new paradigm since it is too easy to fall back onto familiar territory or think that the new system "should" work like the old system. Any transition takes a fair amount of effort.

One thing I would consider in choosing a platform is what platform most people in your sphere work with and/or, if you are getting a job, what platform the work organization uses. you don't want to be the odd person in an organization using something entirely different than anyone else. Plus it is easier to work with people and get help from people using the same system as you are.

As for help with JAWS, yes, it can be quite overwhelming at first. There are many hotkeys and ways of doing things and, even if you've been using JAWS for years, you won't know it all. Plus JAWS is always adding new features.

One thing that can help is the new FS Companion feature recently introduced in JAWS. This AI powered tool which is integrated into JAWS enables you to ask how to perform a certain task with JAWS and it wil provide a detailed response along with hotkeys to get the job done. As with most AI tools, you can also ask follow up questions. In JAWS you can use FS Companion by hitting JAWSKey+space followed by F1 and type your question.

One other point...JAWS has also customized the experience for many aplications using scripts that come with JAWS. The nice part about this is that it makes many programs (especially in Office applications ) much more productive to use as a blind user. I always say that just because a program might be "accessible", meaning that you can navigate to each item on the screen and get feedback, it doesn't mean that the aplication is efficient or productive to use. For example, if you have to tab a thousdand times to get to a particular item on the screen, yes, you can tell what the item is, but if the item is either automatically spoken by JAWS if it changes or you can get to the item by hitting a single hotkey, that is way more productive.

As example, take working with a spreadsheet. Sometimes you might recalculate a spreadsheet and a certain value in a certain cell will change. JAWS can be set up to automatically speak the contents from a specified "monitor" cell as you change other values in the spreadsheet and recalculate. Imagine if you had to navigate to the changed item each time you recalculated the cell.

Anyway, those are just some more considerations that I would take into account in addition to the other advice you've gotten on this list.

Hope that helps. Good luck.

--Pete

he-he... if the OP hasn't graduated by now... 1. On second thought, I probably overstated the need for Office a bit. Even in my last years of teaching, I told students in most of my liberal arts classes to paste their paper content into the learning management system, and I would download it from there. Canvas is used by a lot of universities, and it has great usability as well as working well even in Safari. Others I've used were also accessible. 2. On coding, I recommend starting a new thread here with a question about that specifically, plus doing a search for comments on XCode. 3. Having used Ulysses since before it became a subscription product, I cannot recommend it for school. I love, love, love markdown, but Ulysses in particular had inherent limitations that never allowed me to avoid bringing the doc into Word for the final polish. Particularly for things like resumes. Profs are also likely to use track changes and in-line comments. Even so, PanDoc and NotePad++ go a long way toward letting you write in markdown on PC. There's also a really good NVDA addon that provides browse mode in NotePad++ for markdown and python files. 4. Why is JAWS difficult, someone asked. If you need AI to find settings and help, it's too complicated (I have the same comment about Windows itself!). The JAWS touch cursor didn't work right in many contexts a couple of years ago; it lagged far behind NVDA object navigation. Hopefully, that's gotten better. It's often sluggish because it's such a juggernaut. And, have y'all looked at their new home annual pricing? Yowza! I know people paying less for their car insurance! I would only be paying about the same as Apple Music, but I still won't do it, even though it has always worked somewhat better in MS Office and I have pondered renewing my license for that reason. If you need one of the things only JAWS can do, you just plain need it, though. I put NVDA on about the same usability level as VoiceOver, but with the nice add-on extensibility and greater reliability. I mean, accepting the fact that it frequently has considerable charm, I doubt anyone here would really argue that VO on Mac is as well-maintained as it is on IOS, right? The OP suggested that his experience on IOS would be similar on Mac, but it ain't necessarily so. In sum, my advice would be to try switching screen readers for $0 before switching platforms for $1,000 and see how it goes.

Great last sentence here, 100% spot on.

The place my wife works is pretty much a Microsoft shop. Except for the iPhones everybody has. Oh yeah, and the Macs the creative services Dept., A.K.A. we do graphics, are using. I know at least one person there also runs a Windows VM but I'm not sure if everybody does. In any case, you might be fine being the odd one or odd set out.

Yes, people are going to argue that Macs are great for graphics. But that's sort of my point. If there's a need, A.K.A. I find it better as a blind user, your employer may be fine with it. I mean, maybe not too, employers are weird. But also, I'd argue that nowadays, things are pretty much at parity, or pretty close.

In other words, you can do pretty much the same things, in terms of audio and graphics or video, on both systems. This isn't to say one might not be easier or such, this is the whole point I've been making about OP trying a Mac for their Ph.D. next fall, I assume they've gotten through the preliminary degrees during this thread.

So I thought adding clearer nuance to my opinion.
Applevis users could think that someone hacked the original @theblindguy07 account as my opinions and expression of them have changed so much over two years.
For my defense, I'd say that Ventura was probably the worst starting point on macos any blind user could have had. I wasn't trying to remap windows logic to macos. I knew what a different os/sr meant, and mac wasn't my first real os to try at all. The only difference was the cost of the hardware this time around :)
But, OMG< despite reading the full voiceover user guide and scrolling through an incredible old/long threads on applevis, it seems that for each one single thing I was able to do, I was met with 10 things I had to work around, or just find completely alternative way to do them.
VO was skipping random portion of text in terminal, hardly reading each output properly. Still does that. but I was expecting that at least this would have been truly accessible, IE IE me not having to manually read everything myself, I knew and understand the other navigation tricks in terminal with VO in 5 minutes and loved everything but the essential part that is still more or less broken. Then I tried vim and... I have a dedicated thread about this elsewhere on the site. As much as I love emacspeak I am not really learning it because I want to, at least not completely. It's to hopefully find an integrated workflow that is more consistant. I still use terminal everyday for 2-3 hours and am fine with it, but it could be better.
(little somehow massive edit for me, see here: https://applevis.com/forum/macos-mac-apps/impossible-copy-text-fanfictionnet-its-not-always-voiceovers-fault-we-can)
Web browsing. Summary, for me the real issue that's still present is that VO native selection commands on the web are broken outside very basic html webpages and rare exceptions, like the equivalent of what we have on ios with the rotor, in the mac vo doc they talk about how we can select an element with the rotor and do finger pinch close/open (or remapped with any commander) to select text, but that hardly works on mac. Not that much of a big deal in safari, but on chromium based thing you really have to understand how screen reader processing of the web is completely different outside windows (I don't hate that difference, even the opposite, apple philosophy is better IMO) but the bugs are almost impossible to find if we don't test ourself and hopefully write something to be aware off. I don't mind doing f7 on chrome and mess around with mouse clicks just to be able to select with native commands, I mean outside where there are javascript blocks. I am pretty sure that on ios they have implemented the selection with the rotor properly with the rotor to bypass that, something that their flagship desktop lacks. More or less everything I said about the selection applied with some modified logic to pdf as well.
The last one still has to do with text, VO+t is not as reliable as its equivalent with windows screen readers inside webpages and pdf, or apple books (by saing that I imply that the document is completely accessible of course).
And there are just so many subtle bugs inside iwork suite, fortunately sequoia patched a big amount of that for me. TLDR João Santos was the only one to reply to me and acknowledge that yes, these bugs existed and were very real, that he was able to understand what they were while others couldn't on applevis, that they were very very frustrating and that the real workaround was... avoid nstextview as whey were propagated across all iwork suite, notes and probably textedit in rtf mode as well, around march 2024. He also told me in pm that they were his biggest motivation to at least start something like the vosh project.
My problem is mac accessibility, aside the pile of bugs, is like the pre windows 10 era, where we have to outsource what's not accessible or frustrating experience in apple 1st party app to 3rd party linux stuff. I have 0 problem doing this personally, and this is why I still absolutely love my mac as for all of my personal stuff I can do everything on mac that I could on windows. Chromeos being second after.
If you are not ready to dedicate a good amount of time reporting, don't buy a mac, that's been my take since mid 2024. Like I do a lot of various random things, and ever since I've been able to actually report accessibility bugs, I have never really done this more than once with nvda, as the community does it faster than I can anyway and most things are just so much more stable accessibility wise on windows, that's just the truth.
The day that my full list is marked as cleared, I will be a very happy (even happier) user of the mac as a blind, if we don't get anything as bad as snr again.

I got my start with Windows and Jaws in the 90's, and got a Mac when Tiger came out with Voiceover! It was terrible, but I wanted to support Apple, and over time, things got pretty good! No, it doesn't have a scripting language like Jaws, but I ditched Windows and Jaws when my Windows system crashed for the last time. I've been a Mac guy ever since. I've successfully used Word and Pages, I can surf the web, and the two best DAW's on the market, Pro Tools and Logic have very comprehensive accessibility! I can't speak for 3D printing, but remember, it's a totally different system with totally different key commands than Windows! In addition, your touch pad can be used to navigate with similar commands to your iPhone. It's somewhat buggy, but no worse than Jaws.

João Santos Had to do a deep dive into the macOS source code, in order to find out why many of these bugs were happening in the first place. Remember that, when you are complaining that nobody is explaining why a bug exist. Not all of us are as brave as he is, And willing to scramble our brain cells, trying to decode Apple's dumpster fire. 😝