Jaws style screen reader for Mac?

By Dennis Long, 26 October, 2026

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

What happened to this project? I no longer see the post unless I'm missing it. This is completely possible.

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By Choom on Monday, October 26, 2026 - 05:24

The developer is joining efforts with Turnover.

I may also update Vosh in the future, but the idea is to make it a library that can be used both for screen-readers and automation, and it will have a different name. There's one issue that I'll need to investigate and to my knowledge Turnover doesn't address either which are custom accessibility rotors, which may require using a private API since to my knowledge the public API doesn't make them available.

I personally don't feel comfortable contributing to Turnover since the code is quite a mess. I'll leave that for the AI junkies.

By Dominic on Monday, October 26, 2026 - 05:42

In reply to by Choom

I personally would continue helping with the project myself, however, I'm working on other projects which demand more of my attention, including my website. I also do not use it enough to fully contribute.

But yes, the developer of the jaws type of screenreader for macOS has joined forces with TurnOver. And, from my knowledge, TurnOver now also has a jaws keyboard layout. Haven't tried this myself because I have an absolute distain for jaws.

By Dominic on Monday, October 26, 2026 - 05:46

I don't know how much freedom scientific are earning, but the fact that a blind person from the UK, regardless of using AI or not, the fact that he single-handedly created a screen reader, that, in some cases is better than VoiceOver, when freedom scientific were asked about this multiple times and said they couldn't do it because they didn't have the resources, it's just astonishing. Maybe, just maybe, the jaws developers will stop cramming so much AI into their software for once, and they might actually decide that they want to help? Although knowing American companies and just corporate entities in general, that's not happening. I would go into more of a rant about how corporate businesses are putting in less effort than the standard everyday user, but that's beyond the scope here.

By Singer Girl on Monday, October 26, 2026 - 06:11

Completely agree with him. I honestly hate jaws. I’m thinking seriously after this year. I am definitely going to cancel my subscription. I have a whole annual subscription in the US and honestly, I’m not even using it that much so it’s really not worth paying for it. I’m better off figuring out how to use NVDA probably. I have never used that or installed it in my Windows computer but I’m thinking seriously I’m doing that. Yeah freedom, scientific overpriced, crazy software company, and honestly dealing with their customer. Service is not a great experience so yeah, I think we’re better off making something ourselves like we’re doing now with the NVDA on the window side and turnover on the max side in building draws style components into the heck if there was a screen that could run like the jaws interface I might try a Mac. I’ve never tried to Mac because I heard so many things about it but people on here and have voiceover isn’t how different they interfaces and stuff like that from what you know in Windows so I just never was interested in wanting to try it because of some of the people’s not good experiences on here but yeah well hopefully this new screen reader doesn’t end up working out and let people have a good experience with it on the Mac and then once you know our established thing and people seem to like it maybe a few more years maybe probably wouldn’t try looking at the back. I don’t know.

In engineering, the last 20% of a project takes 80% of the time to get right. It's easy to build impressive demos with lots of quirks; it's addressing all those quirks that takes a huge amount of time and effort, and it requires properly structured code, because without containerized architectures, bugs can interact with one another in lots of complex and unpredictable ways. This is the reason why I'm not embracing Turnover myself; I checked out the code and it's already a mess, so I predict that the project will crumble under its untamed complexity long before reaching the stable milestone.

I also hate JAWS, and refuse to pay for a screen reader out of principle. I'd say if you're entertaining the thought of exploring a Mac in the future, you may want to get acquainted with NVDA on Windows first, as NVDA's object navigation model is similar to VoiceOver's, which could potentially ease the learning curve if you do eventually switch.