Why do you stick to/use Windows?

hold up hold up hold up wait... so jaws for mac wasn't an insomnia induced hallucination? Weird

It's just a matter of the largestt screen readers giving the most well maintained accessibility for me, I've got no particular love for any platform but windows screen readers are the big players outside of pocket computer land and I think we all know it. I say this as someone who really loves the concept and work behind chromevox and indeed uses a chromebook for most simple web browser or online office stuff but the windows screen readers innovate a little and give me redundancy on the same machine, I need that for my heavy lifting computer. I don't know macs much personally but totally respect how they may be your best option for specific creative work flows and the like or if it's what you prefer cool, I wish I had such nice laptop hardware but I make do haha.

So, on this very website in fact, somebody posted an email from Ryan Jones from Vispero on this topic. In short, the Mac is too restricted to allow JAWS.
https://www.applevis.com/forum/accessibility-advocacy/contacting-freedom-scientific-request-jaws-come-macos-ios?page=1

Out of curiosity, for the experts here, what are the difficulties involved in making a third-party screen reader for Mac? I've heard a persistent, though slightly unbelievable, story that Jaws was developing a version for MacOs. If true, whatever happened? I can understand why there's no NVDA for Mac, but what caused Freedom Scientific to back out?

There's absolutely no technical reason for third-party screen-readers to not be available on macOS, and I say this from personal experience as someone who actually started a screen-reader project for this platform in 2023, which I ended up abandoning for a number of reasons, but whose code was fundamental for actually getting hired to my current job. In fact the reason why I ended up creating an account on this site after nearly a decade of lurking was to announce that, contrary to popular belief, creating a new screen-reader for the Mac is well within the realm of possibility, so if you browse my post history here, you will find my first post where I linked to a Youtube video with an extremely embryonic demonstration that this could be done, followed by another post some time later with a link to the actual source code on my personal GitHub profile.

These days I know a lot more about Apple's accessibility infrastructure than I did back then, because part of my code for that screen-reader ended up in a product I'm working on for my current employer. The true reasons why I think nobody is actually bothering with this are because the number of blind people using macOS is likely tiny, pretty much everything that is available on macOS is also available on Windows, and Windows has a much broader choice of third-party tools compared to the Mac. All things that end up contributing to the solidification of its dominant position in the market and generally making it hard to actually profit from providing accessibility on macOS, which is not a problem for me but is a problem for companies. While I'm no sure

As for my own experience as a solo developer, accessibility on macOS is quite complex, full of quirks, has bad to non-existing documentation, and even first-party application support is quite inconsistent, so the research required to even think of matching VoiceOver just in terms of navigation and announcements is a huge time sink. One of the reasons why I ended up abandoning the project was because I was spending more time reverse-engineering VOiceOver than actually progressing with code. Although I'm perfectly capable of reverse-engineering things on both x86 and ARM, the fact is that reading machine-generated optimized assembly code is not a form of entertainment for me, if it was I would probably make a career as a security researcher instead. Also VoiceOver works well enough for me, and honestly with the exception of web browsers, I actually find the experience to be superior on macOS.

Wow. I really thought that it was because of the impossibility rather than other factors, so the fact of you saying it's technically achievable makes me question fs here who have all the funding and developers they'd need. Anyways. Whether or not vosh is on yatus currently the fact that it brought you on this site is I think a win win for everyone as you gave incredible technical and general expertise few can. So huge thanks for that and pls keep it up whatever you're doing!!

You don't have to be a Freedom Scientific engineer to guess why JAWS for Mac never happened.

Anyone who has ever written JSL knows that JAWS, at it's core, is deeply integrated with Windows APIs. I doubt JAWS was designed with any kind of portability layer. Consequently, porting JAWS to Mac would be impractical. A complete rewrite from scratch would be the only approach. That would be a significant investment of time and resources. Since MacOS is roughly 10% of the non-pocket market, the ROI didn't justify the expense.

Slightly off-topic, but, 1 good investments they recently made was Jaws for Kiosk stations. These self-service kiosks run not only Windows, but also Android or some version of linux at times. The current Kiosk solution seems to be only for Windows and Android. But, that get's me thinking, did they creat Jaws for Android?
Curious if anyone tried it yet.
To know more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jv71M2o7dg

Hi SeasonKing,

You could find some information at the link below. According to that page, it does indeed work for both Android and Windows.
https://www.tpgi.com/accessibility-solutions/jaws-kiosk/

HTH.

I wish it existed for Linux as well. The machines in my office are running some light-weight version of linux. Their dev team says that running Orca on those machines is not feasible.

Can a VM that can run Shadows over Silesia also run Mortal Combat 1? I have Shadows Over Silesia running mostly smoothly here.

Hi Tayo,

That is a tricky question. Mortal Kombat 1 takes quite a bit of resources to run well. While I cannot comment from a virtual machine experience, I can tell you that my current HP laptop runs both Shadows over Silesia and Mortal Kombat 11 (Xbox version), on very high settings with no issues, yet the PC version of Mortal Kombat one I have to run at the lowest settings in order to have good frame rate.
I do not have the best gaming laptop on the market, but my laptop is fairly decent, running a 3+ gigahertz AMD processor, with Radeon dedicated graphics, 16 GB of RAM, and one terabyte of SSD storage.

If you have a dedicated graphics card, and decent enough RAM, you will likely be able to play Mortal Kombat 1 on a VM. Whether or not you can play it with decent graphics will depend highly on your processor and graphics card, as well as available ram.

HTH.

Does anyone know if on mac parallel and or vmware is good enough so I can play sos in a vm? My windows laptop is an hp zbook 14u g6 with both primary and secondary gpus being very bad and this laptop is already in a bad state so I think that even if it's in a vm my mac should in theory be able to handle this load more than this current laptop?

I've always used windows when it came to computers. The first version of windows I used was the trusty windows XP, running window eyes 4.5 at school. Later, I got my own computer threw the state, running the same operating syste, along with window eyes 6.0. From there, I moved from windows XP to windows seven. From windows seven to windows ten, talk about a serious learning curve. Two years ago, I took the plunge an upgraded my current laptop to windows eleven.

What are your Mac specs? Also, you might have better luck with Parallels over anything else, as I understand it, Parallels has optimizations for gaming in a virtual environment.

I have huge word docs and use Excel spreadsheets. As far as I can tell, no spreadsheet on the Mac is as accessible as Excel in windows using Jaws. I have yet to hear of any word processing app on the mac that can handle a 400 page document and be as accessible as Word is on Windows. I don't like the things MS is doing, forcing upgrades and the like, but every time I try another platform, I find out why I still use Windows.

Funnily enough excel for the totally unrelated that it was first released for the mac is the most accessible office app of ms on mac. The only thing better than it is to do. Drag and drop is the most useful thing here and VO is quite good at that. I remember in my stat course creating pivot tables and stuff like that pretty easily with excel on the mac.

It's a good point. iWork might be good but apple know (or hopefully they do know) that they could never compete with something as huge and old as excel alone, microsoft is king in that for a very good reason. Otherwise, I'm sorry but google suite has already won with with students as even that is more than what most need while microsoft office for student is like a screen reader written in assembly, too overkilled for the need of that market. It's really OPed for businesses though. For accessibility, as much as I love ranting about the mac I think for the general visual aspect of drag and drop and alignment I think iwork has a slight advantage, but the experience is indeed better on windows and I have tried all 3 products on the mac side already. For students I think they are very good, accessibility is still more than decent (compared to libreoffice on windows or linux for example) but the problem is always with cross platform formatting.
The problem with that is that both companies are playing oh I am not the responsible and nobody wants to actually do the right thing so that segment of the market can access the industry standard more easily on the mac, they are happy to let this fight continue as they know that very few in the VI world would have enough motivation to call them out for this. This is my hot take of the day.

So, MS Word on Windows no longer has a problem with large docs? Because 20 years ago, the only way to create anything other than a modest-sized manuscript was to place chapters in separate files and tie them together with a master outline.

Next, I imagine you'll tell me Windows no longer develops a sluggish boot after you've used it a few months.

Why are they putting in these awesome fixes and not advertising it? They might be able to pull back some of the diaspora.

So, MS Word on Windows no longer has a problem with large docs? Because 20 years ago, the only way to create anything other than a modest-sized manuscript was to place chapters in separate files and tie them together with a master outline.

That actually brings back memories of when Excel spreadsheets were limited to 65536 rows, or making the same complex select query in Access twice in a row without actually changing anything in the database would produce completely different results. As late as in 2010 I had to help my cousin migrate his master's thesis research data into a proper database because he found out the hard way that the size of Excel spreadsheets was capped to 1048576 rows.

I've also been on the Internet for long enough to remember people using the WinNuke denial of service attack and DCOM system-level remote code execution exploits to scare and spy on others on IRC, as well as the related Blaster worm that did not require any actual action from users and as such wrecked havoc in corporate networks. In addition, watching porn on Internet explorer used to be regarded as an invitation to have your computer completely compromised by a healthy ecosystem of viruses, especially if the Flash Player plug-in was also involved.

As a Linux user back then I avoided being a victim of most of those problems myself, but I vividly remember how unsafe Windows really was even 20 years ago, and how little Microsoft actually cared. The comments to this thread on reddit perfectly capture the essence of the highly insecure and hostile Internet old wild west environment of the 90s that I remember all too well.

I can happily edit a 400 page document with it, and never a problem. If I didn't like that, Libre office also works in windows fairly well.

The big thing with Windows, to me, is if thing a doesn't work, there are other options. I find that less so on Mac or Linux. Besides, I find the inability to update software on Linux, for any normal human, to be its major sticking point. If I am going to try out the OS, I want to be able to try out the latest version of the speech software, but you have to be some kind of genius hacker to make that happen.

Package managers are a thing, they’re not that hard to use

Speaking of blasts from the past, does anyone here remember a time when you could access the root directory of any website online, so long as it did not have a proper index.HTML file, and you could pretty much steal any data you wanted from that server?
Good times…
In Edward Snowden's book titled, "Permanent Record", he talks about being a teenager during this time, and downloading what was essentially documentation for nuclear weaponry and such. All thanks to that little route directory exploit.

Since we are reminiscing about Word, does anyone remember the, "Melissa", virus of 1999? This naughty little thing affected Microsoft Word and Outlook, and I think ultimately resulted in something like 300 corporations affected, and cost something like $80 million in Damages. If that doesn't whet your whistle, how about the infamous, "I love you", virus of 2000, that affected something like 45 million computers worldwide, cost billions in damages, and even caused the United States Pentagon, as well as the British Parliament and MI6 to shut down their email servers out of fear?

Good times, indeed ...

Whether or not Microsoft cared about the vulnerability of their operating system, I cannot say. I can say, however, that today's windows OS, with the inclusion of Windows Defender, is so sophisticated and effectively protected, that third-party antivirus software developers are offering everything including their kitchen sinks, just to get people to subscribe, because Windows Defender is so effective now, that there has been a loss in revenue across the board with third-party antivirus software. I learned that little tidbit from my cyber security professor last year when I took a cyber security course with Cisco Networking Academy.

I also learned that in 2020, macOS officially had more Malware reports than Microsoft. Not because Apple does not care about their operating system, but rather that in the last five years or so, hackers have begun to broaden their horizons as more and more people and companies are using Mac computers these days. Picked that up in my cyber security class as well.

Scary stuff!

I forgot how many steps it took, but since Orca relies on Speech dispatcher and other things, it was long and involved. I have yet to find a destro with the Mate desktop that had an easy way to keep Orca and all its dependencies up to date. To me this is the largest problem with Linux. For many issues the best option is to switch destros, and I'm just not that into reinstalling the o/s for fun.

After reading all of the comments, I would like to share my experience with Windows. For my gratuation gift, I received an HP laptop running windows 8. I have used it for awhile, until I transitioned to MacOS in 2016. As of yesterday, I pooled out the laptop, which used to be my moms former computer after I transitioned to MacOS, and it can no longer receive updates, not even Windows 11. I tested Microsoft Word, and I agree, Microsoft Word works extremely well with both Jaws and NVDA with no issues. yes, MacOS and iOS works very well together with features such as handoff, facetime, etc, however, Microsoft word is not that accessible with VoiceOver. Nevertheless, I also tested microsoft edge as well as google chrome with NVDA, and web navigation works very well, without needing to press extra keys. If I ever wanted to switch back to windows, I would. Sure, I would miss the macOS features such as handoff, but since I have apple music, at least I could use itunes to play songs that I downloaded/streamed from apple music. I also herd that you can use the phonelink app for messaging, as well as answering phone calls on computer, but I haven't tryed it. I could also run windows using vmware fusion, but I'm not sure if anyone has tryed it.

Hi all,

Quick note for transparency that earlier today, a number of comments were removed from this thread due to the discussion getting into personal attacks, which goes against our forum guidelines. Comment authors have already been contacted privately. If you have any questions, please reach out using our Contact Form.

Thanks,

Michael

The version's i used were windows 7 and 10 when i was in school, i used jaws on them, i now am using an hp laptop with windows 11, i like it, i use NVDA on it and love it, i also love that i can use phone link to send files between my phone and laptop and use the keyboard on my computer to control my phone