if you're proofing and doing track changes, go Windows. I have yet to meet a mac user who can handle it. They claim they are so good with their technology then send me a .pages or a word doc with strike-through turned on for random words or added silliness in brackets, which they say is 'what they can manage'.

If you do find a nice VoiceOver way of handling though, please share?

I’ve heard very good things about the Ulysses app being very accessible for VI and blind people. There are some blind writers that seem to swear by it. It might be worth checking out.

1) what specifically is the issue with Word on Mac?

Some people say it’s slow, not very responsive and laggy and buggy. I don’t know myself maybe I work slow enough that I don’t run in to these issues.


2) This is for personal use, but I write fiction and will need to send documents back and forth to other people in word format for edits and such. will this be a pain if I use Pages and convert to word format (ie/ will formatting get lost)? Is it better to stick with word?

Not in the microsoft word app itself but if you convert from pages to word it may lose some I think. Or have the potential to.

3)It is crucial that I be able to easily correct formatting, track changes, read comments, check spelling/grammar, and other detailed formatting edits, but I don’t need tables, images, etc. since this is just novel and story writing. Is one going to work better for me than the other?

Probably microsoft word, and knowing how to do it, pages is a much more simplistic app that doesn’t do as much. Microsoft really built a lot in to their app, and it’s one of the most advanced word processing apps out there.



4) Are they both awful enough to deal with that I should just move over to a pc laptop?

I haven’t had that bad of a luck with either. Pages is fairly good but more simple. Microsoft word seems to not be doing this to me.

5) is there any crossover with commands used for either of these programs in voiceover vs using word in jaws, or are all the commands totally different?


No commands on the mac is different from windows drastically. The two apps and their navigation would be similar as compared to windows though, yeah, no.

Pages is better, it responds faster with voiceover. Plus its native to it, being that both are designed for the mac.
As another commenter says, people can and often do struggle with formatting. Though it is possible to overcome, if you put in the work to truly learn the program. Same with word and jaws. It can really work, if you make it work.

My experience editing documents both with Word (on Windows) and Pages (on MacOS) as a totally blind individual is terrible, because those applications are meant to be used by the sighted and I cannot trust myself to produce anything of quality unassisted, plus the format conversions aren't perfect. My answer to that, since I'm a control freak and have very good spatial awareness, is to use LaTeX, for which you can find plenty of templates online, though it's quite technical, and debugging overflow and underflow box warnings can be annoying without sight, but at least you get warnings indicating potential visual issues with the documents.

As for the screen-reader commands, while I've only used NVDA on Windows, I think I can safely say that everything is different, and smoother, on that platform, and I can say this because most commands you will be using to navigate are native to Windows itself, in contrast to MacOS which is designed to be used with a mouse or touchpad and as a result has dedicated screen-reader commands for navigation. I'm a Mac (and now Linux) user by choice, but for everyday tasks I find Windows to be better, especially since Apple hasn't been giving a damn about fixing long standing issues with VoiceOver and has even introduced new ones with recent MacOS releases.