Microsoft Word and Voiceover, whats the deal?

I encounter other issues with very long documents. Voiceover chokes. My solution, rather than getting a windows laptop, is to have parallels which means I can run windows on my mac which should resolve your issues.

Personally, I don't think much love has been given to word on mac, especially when it comes to accessibility. There is a lot to learn and, as you discovered, at some point there are barriers. I think the expectation is document creation is a windows thing, and thats where accessibility efforts lie.

There is obviously pages too, but that introduces a whole set of other issues with conversion.

VoiceOver has its own quirks with Pages too. As mentioned above, either you get Parallel VM or you get yourself a Windows machine.

I've changed my opinion on that :) but 101% agree. If you needed to work with microsoft things why choose the mac in the first place? Or was it bought for you?

When the application developer is also an operating system developer and provides screen reader support, it probably works best on their own platform. For example

Microsoft applications are most accessible under Microsoft Windows.

iWorks requires an Apple operating system.

iCloud for Windows has been the subject of complaints on this forum. Making its accessibility work is probably less of a priority for Apple than the macOS, iOS and iPadOS equivalents.

Google applications work very well (with good accessibility) on their own ChromeOS platform.

Back when my critique group moved to Google Docs, I did a deep dive on using it with VoiceOver. Taming the Beast: Google Docs on MacOS. That blog describes my workflow for using Google Docs. It also contains links to available screen reader and accessibility information. Those links might provide information on working with embedded tables.

The complexity of Google Docs and its absurd keyboard shortcut pallette might seem intimidating. But daily use will result in enough familiarity and muscle memory to make you productive.

I have a Windows machine with NVDA just in case I need Word for something that Google Docs can't do. I haven't used Word on that computer for the past year. Google Docs does everything I need it to.

Disclaimer: I rarely use tables in Google Docs. For tabular data, I prefer Google Sheets or (MacOS) Numbers.

A simple web search for "Using Word with NVDA" produced multiple results that might help you get a quick idea of its usability. In my testing to date, I've found it to be entirely usable. I didn't push it with large documents.

The official NVAccess site has complete documentation for purchase.

Every time I make a document that has more than one page, word gets stuck. Voiceover gets stuck actually. The curser still moves down, but voiceover doesn't, it's like it's stuck in this frozen state. And don't get me started on tables. It's to the point where I just download the document sent from my teachers,, go to the file in finder, open it in quick look, select and copi everything out of the quick look, paste it into TextEdit, answer the questions, save the document, select and coppie everything back into word into a whole new document, save it again, then send it through Outlook. When I'm extra lazy most of the time, I'll just send the text file instead of the word document.

I miss the days when Apple's iWork Suite was considered a viable alternative to Microsoft Office. 😢

And I am wondering for those who say Apple cares about accessibility. In 2026 basic table navigation using essential text editing app like Pages is, to say the least, buggy.

Will I even be able to use my newly qcquired Mac for college? The reason I chose a Mac over Windows was purely because I already own a Windows desktop and I wanted nice hardware, a lightweight laptop that I could cary around, but these comments are seriously making me scared. Obviously for some assignments I am still planning to use Windows, but when I'm actually in class I wanna use my Mac. What conversion problems do you guys have with Pages? Also how well does Excel work on a Mac with VO?

In Microsoft Word, you should be able to use Tab and Shift-Tab to navigate among table cells. If I remember rightly, this is suppored by MS-Word for macOS, not just in the Windows version. I'm not suggesting this will solve all of the problems, but it may help.

I think you can be in the best of both worlds or, maybe almost the best of both worlds. Buy the parallels license from parallels website. There was a deal going on it recently. I got pro for £57 for the year which I don't think is too bad. There is a guide I wrote kicking around the site to install it.

Unfortunately, we need to be a visitor to both worlds, windows and mac or, I find, it serves me best to be able to work in both. Each have flaws, each have advantages.

Ventura is four years old at this point, and Sequoia is two. At least try the latest version of all the software before casting judgment.

Normally I would recommend writing Markdown and converting to PDF, but since you are using tables which are quite a mess in Markdown, I won't recommend it this time. A Markdown editor might work, but I have none to recommend.

My immediate thought would be tab to the cell you want, interact, and edit the contents. But I've never touched Word on a Mac. Hell I haven't even touched Word on Windows in ages, like probably 2007 or something. So I'm just curious.

Anyone who needs Microsoft Word to have improved accessibility with macOS VoiceOver should probably submit a support case to Microsoft (especially if you have a Microsoft 365 subscription), or contact an advocacy group that can take up the issue. We know from Apple Pages taht macOS can do better, and some of the responsibility appears to be Microsoft's.

I'll be studying political science. From time to time I'll need Excel for statistical analysis but most of my work will be in Word/Pages, I expect long documents, too. Powerpoint won't be an issue since I'm keeping this Windows machine and I'll make any presentations that I need on Windows, but any tips on using Word/Pages would be greatly appreciated.

Thing is, this Windows machine is a desktop. I bought my Mac to be the on-the-go laptop when I'm actually at uni. I would like to know what conversion issues you are facing with Pages so I can prepare myself in advance for the possible hell I'll be experiencing. I love the hardware on the Mac, it's just too good, if the software is passable than it's fine with me since most long-document work will be done on my Windows machine, however, exams/tests at uni will be done on my Mac.

Just get yourself a windows laptop, very honestly. You'll be fighting with voiceover every second. And for precize formatting or you learn something like latex, or... you'll probably end up using a vm with utm or similar on mac. Then why the mac in the first place. But I kinda get it too, I did social science where there is a lot of writing and some excel with my mac as school laptop and I managed to survive, but the experience really wasn't something efficient. Doable certainly, I am not saying otherwise. But not something I'd smile. And there are just random bugs that combine for the worse experience ever.
As a developer I am ok cause I at least understand the why (most of the time) and can just manage my way out of it, but if tomorrow a windows laptop with real 20hrs battery arrives... But it's possible.
Oh and google docs with 5-6 people moving in the document on chrome on mac will make you hate voiceover even more. From experience.
And no google docs editting experience for daily thing is worse than pages.
Look, if in your context submitting well formatted pdf is accepted, then you won't find mac to be a problem.
And for math work, the calculator on the mac is a waste of storage and an insult, but voiceover and mathjax/mathml are quite good, it's there out of the box. We have decent math equation in braille (nemeth, english braille only) after like 10 years of the iphone having this I believe... But the us layout and typing latex in textedit on mac is still an absolute joy with apple own keyboard, idk why. Even things like cengage learning and virtually every decently accessible textbook as a platform can work.
Just selecting text in pdf is a nightmare, if not virtually impossible.

As someone who has used Windows for 10+ years I was bored. I am adventurous at heart and am willing to take on new challenges. Mac was always what I wanted hardware wise but I didn't take the plunge in primary/high school because the school provided me a laptop and I had a desktop at home. Now in college I get to choose, and as long as it's doable, I'm fine with it. On the Mac, I'll mostly be using Word to make notes and for exams, some Excel, Pages, for long document creation I'll still stick to Windows. I just want this Mac to get me through a day of writing and that's all I require. Obviously I'll be using it for other things besides just school work but mainly for that.

Sounds like the decision was already made. But there are some fine Windows laptops, even with Arm if you want. The latest Intel Panther Lakes and Qualcomm Snapdragons give MacBook a run for its money on battery life. I don't know that there are many Windows laptops that have the speakers of a MacBook though. The notion you have to buy a MacBook for battery life though, is outdated.

I can't help you at all with advice on tables or spreadsheets, as I've not had experience. But what I have done is written a novel in Pages on Mac, converted it to Word, submitted it to my editor, and then worked with her track changes. It was definitely doable.

This is how I used my mac in this program, as a good secondary machine and best laptop for on the go. You could even like it after 2-3 years of getting used to!

I'm sorry to have to revive this topic but here goes:
having read all of your comments I was scared to try Word, but I figured why not? So I installed it and immediately just for the sake of it opened a 200+ page document. As far as I can tell it works just fine. What do you guys mean when you say it chokes with VO when a long document is open? I cannot reproduce this behavior. Sure, there are some bugs, especially when it suddenly just moves me to the next page even though I haven't finished reading the current one when pressing up and down arrow to move line by line and then I have to go all the way back but it can be avoided, and for now I might just stick with it and use Pages only when something breaks. I would like to know what specific issues you guys have before something actually breaks in the middle of doing some serious work. When you say that we should be prepared to use VO cursor to use Word comfortably you mean navigating with VO+arrow keys? Sorry if this sounds a bit like I don't know what I'm doing but I'm still in the figuring things out stage on this Mac.

UTM nd unattend.xml will give you an infinitely better experience less some gpu specific tasks but at this point just get a real windows pc.