[ClawsOnPaws]

Blind person using Apple products here, and at least for phones, I agree. I wouldn't say it's exclusively because of iPhone, but a large part of my independence is definitely it. There have been problems, bugs that go unfixed for years, MacOS VoiceOver is quite a disaster even though I do still use and enjoy the platform overall, and anything worth using can be criticized I think. But iOS has so many features built in that help me every single day. VoiceOver, but also all of the features utilizing vision like door detection, OCR, etc. they're in the magnifier as well so you don't need VoiceOver enabled to play with them, and I think a number of them also require a lidar sensor?

Anyway, my phone is such an important companion wherever I go that I keep several magsafe batteries on me whenever I leave the house for a significant time. It has made an absolutely huge difference in confidence. It is definitely one of the single most important assistive tech devices I have together with my computer.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> MacOS VoiceOver is quite a disaster

I am curious as to why (definitely not arguing, but I’m not blind, and only use it for testing).

I write (Apple) apps to be accessible. I would be grateful for guidance in making them as useful as possible.

[ClawsOnPaws]

It is just random bugs. Switching punctuation schemes. The terminal doesn't read very well, VoiceOver loves to say "not responding" in Safari and locks up, live regions don't always read correctly, quick nav (basically automatically holding down the voiceover modifier so you can more quickly use navigate through the screen) adds random delay to each key press, it's just lots and lots and lots of small issues like this that compound. This is just a small list of them. None of them are a huge problem by itself, but combined they do make things frustrating sometimes. And then of course the ability to script badly behaving, or completely inaccessible, apps is just missing, so you can't fix apps even if you knew how to. And of course VoiceOver on the Mac is all you get. So if you don't like it, tough luck. You won't ever get a real alternative that can access what VoiceOver can.

[jcelerier]

> VoiceOver loves to say "not responding" in Safari and locks up,

I wonder, what's the correct solution for this ? Because so many apps I use including browser are definitely "not responding" multiple times per day for various reasons (full ram, internet stall, etc.)

[n0ot]

Using VoiceOver compounds the not responding issue. I don't know how its internals work, but I imagine it tries to keep a view of the window's state--tree of elements, ETC. If the window has a lot going on, VoiceOver can get really sluggish, and I think it must somehow block the underlying app's ability to send/receive events, because you will press VO+right arrow to move to the next element, VO says "Safari/Chrome/Brave" not responding, and if you open up Force Quit, it reflects the same there. Reading a large diff on GitHub flat out doesn't work for me at all. Also, sometimes when navigating certain webpages, VoiceOver will just outright crash. Luckily, it does restart itself (not that pressing CMD+F5 is hard), but then my focus is moved to a completely different part of the page.

[n0ot]

I honestly don't know how anyone thinks terminal support in VoiceOver is acceptable--it's virtually unusable. It's so bad that I used to fire up a Windows VM just for a functioning terminal, and while I was at it, I'd browse the web and use Notepad++ there, because Windows accessibility is just better (I used NVDA). But then I discovered Fenrir, figured out that it worked with Vim (NVDA doesn't), shut down the VM, and never looked back. Today, I use Wezterm, which VoiceOver doesn't read at all. In my case, that's good, because the only thing I want talking in the terminal is my terminal screen reader (I started writing my own, and it's my daily driver).

To be fair, reading the terminal is a completely different beast from reading a GUI. In addition to building a static view of the screen for review, you have to handle dynamic updates (auto read). Cursor movement tracking, figuring out when to read what, when not to read (an f just appeared on my screen, but I just typed the letter f; if key echo is turned off, I don't want to hear "f"). If a line was just added, it should be read, but if my cursor was moved to a different line, I want to hear the line it moved to, but not if that line was just read because it just appeared. All sorts of rules you sort of discover as you go. But the one thing you definitely don't want is for any new change to interrupt what was already being read, and that's exactly what VoiceOver does.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Thanks!

I do my best to make my apps accessible, so feedback like this helps.

[Fr0styMatt88]

Will drop this here in case you’re not aware of it (but I’m guessing you probably are), sorry if a bit off-topic.

I’m low-vision and made great use of Microsoft Soundscape until it got discontinued. I’d been waiting for an alternative for ages and didn’t realise one actually got released and is on the app store!

VoiceVista:

https://apps.apple.com/au/app/voicevista/id6450388413

[ClawsOnPaws]

I absolutely LOVE! Voice Vista. It is an amazing bit of software. I wasn't able to use SoundScape when it first came out because it was never made available in my region, but VV is, and I would never want to miss it anymore when traveling. I love it. A lot.

[throwaway894345]

> bugs that go unfixed for years

For what it's worth, text selection has been badly broken on iOS for at least a decade and autocorrect has been steadily getting worse for probably the same amount of time, and these are features that affect the mainstream segment of Apple users on a daily basis. Apple seems generally happy to let bugs go unaddressed for years and years regardless of how many people they affect or how often.

[jjtheblunt]

How is text selection badly broken on iOS for at least a decade?

I seem to have it working just fine, though am not sure how I may have configured it to do such, without dedicating such to memory.

[Fr0styMatt88]

It’s really really inconsistent. Sometimes select all is available, sometimes not. Sometimes the handles don’t work. Selecting text in a scrollable region is fiddly, etc.

I’ve seen an insane drop in the quality of swipe typing recently as well. To the point where I’ll often go back to regular typing. I’ve made maybe six or more corrections just to this paragraph alone.

[jjtheblunt]

I think swipe typing suggests words inconsistent with any higher level language model, like word tuples, when proposing words which are possible matches for letter sequences swiped.

and it drives me crazy too.

I've just had good luck it seems with text select.

Have you found any way to do a Find within a span of text on iOS? That would be very useful, but I haven't seen it.

[Robdel12]

Excuse my language here but: I fucking love this! My mom pretty much mirrors your experience. I purposefully left out macOS and voiceover. I would almost call it unusable, sadly. The amount of key layering that voiceover and macOS in general has makes it very hard to use.

I’ve been hacking on a macOS app that leans on LLMs, vision use, and the AX macOS APIs to try and make voiceover less.. prickly haha. Hoping to visit in person soon to watch her use it :)