iPad for productivity is a mess

In my experience, the iPad is very little more than a device for reading and basic text editing when it comes to accessibility. I could list numerous issues with text editing—many beyond those already mentioned—but I’ll spare everyone the details with that summary.

Now that I'm reading the editing difficulties you all are having, I am re-considering purchasing an iPad.

Hello:
I have an iPad with the Magic keyboard and trackpad. I've noticed the trackpad is very sensitive and often jumps me to the menu bar when I am editing text and accidentally touch part of it. I've gone under settings and set the response to slow, which helps a bit, but it is still really annoying. I wish I could disable the trackpad as I don't use it, but it is part of the keyboard case and I don't know of any way of totally turning it off.
Hope this helps.
Jim

There is now a new option in VoiceOver settings to ignore trackpad. Activate it and you're good to go

I had a really bad experience with iPads and it sucks, because ideally I'd like an iPad/tablet to complement my desktop as a laptop replacement. I had an iPad Pro 10.5 that I've had since before I lost my eyesight and I was using the Smart Keyboard I've had since 2017 and the Logitech Slim Touch keyboard I think? No matter what, if I had QuickNav on or off and Full Keyboard Access on or off, the keyboards would act up - for example, pressing H would go to Home instead of heading and the keyboard would straight up stop typing in the middle of writing. I even tried with an iPad 9th generation, and the same thing happened with the Smart Keyboard. It's really, really shameful.

Since i started with the i pad a few years ago i have had no problems using it. Right now i am using a i pad air m 2 i use it as a replacement for my lab top i find it easier to use and plus it is portable as well

I had an iPad 4th gen that maxed out at iOS 10.3.3. In spite of that, it was a great device. Text editing worked flawlessly. But it was old hardware. I needed it to run Zoom, Google Docs, and Google Drive all at the same time, but it wasn't up to the task. It ran slow and heated up when I tried it.

To address the multitasking issue, I traded in my old iPad for the M1 iPad Pro, and this came with a new OS upgrade that totally threw text editing in the toilet. Sadly, the 4th-gen iPad was gone as part of the trade-in deal, so there was no turning back. I ended up giving my M1 iPad Pro to my spouse, who uses it as the world's most expensive eBook reader. I've been without an iPad ever since and haven't looked back.

For me the iPad is the most wonderful device ever. I’m using an iPad Air with M2 chip, previous to that an iPad Air 4 which lasted me an astonishing 4 years. I used entry level iPads before that and they lasted about 2 years before replacement. Haven’t used a desktop or laptop in more than ten years. The Air series have more powerful processors and more RAM. You have to keep up with those needs with the way technology is going if you want to multitask or do other things that require the more powerful hardware. Anyway I’ve never had any issues after my very first iPad was replaced under warranty around ten years ago. So let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water. The capability of these devices is absolutely amazing.

You are getting VoiceOver for iPadOS, good. But what else? Unless you aren't happy single-tasking, what are you getting from an iPad that your iPhone can't already do? Keyboard shortcuts? Screen size and iPad app layouts?

Honestly, for all the problems of VoiceOver in macOS, I can't understand why anyone would go for an iPad when they could get a ChromeBook for similar use cases of content consumption and document editing. And you'd have honest-to-goodness keyboard support, and rich web apps for all the stuff you'd do on your iPad, at a fraction of the cost. iPad hardware is vastly overpowered. If you really need the power, just grab a Mac.

So what drives people to iPad from a blindness perspective? Enquiring minds, etc.

I've been using the M4 iPad Pro since May 2024 and have connected it to the official Magic Keyboard.
I cannot confirm the issues that have been outlined in this thread. When writing, the keyboard does not randomly stop working, focus does not jump to the status bar and navigation with VO arrows works flawlessly. Keep in mind that I've set VoiceOver to ignore the trackpad, maybe this helps as already pointed out here.
Split View, however, is quite messy, so I prefer using CMD-Tab to jump between apps.

As I mentioned on a different thread, I have a 9th generation iPad sitting right beside me that I don't really use for anything because both the desktop and mobile experience is subpar compared to the Mac and iPhone, and I can't really imagine what kind of use other blind people could be getting out of this that would require an M-series chip. I mean I can come up with some ideas, like audio raytracing and inferencing of small neural network models, but I don't think anyone would seriously choose an iPad over a Mac for this kind of stuff, and I'm not sure hardware raytracing is even available on M-series models before the M3.

Even for normal people I think that the value of the M-series iPad is simply not there, however as a blind user I think that comparing it to a Ferrari without tires is not much of an exaggeration. Pretty good hardware severely handicapped by an OS designed to enforce a greedy walled garden, and doesn't stand out at anything in particular compared to its closest platforms. For me the iPad is a great example of the antonym of synergy.

You're right reagarding the M Chips. But the M-series chips, at least for me, are not the reason for byuing the iPad Pro.
I wanted to have Face ID, better speakers, and support for the new Magic Keyboard. I don't care whether the device is powered by an M-series chip or A-series at all. Like you said, the power cannot be used by the limits provided by the OS design.

I keep dipping in. I love the idea of the iPad but issues with text editing reliability makes it a no go for productivity. I may as well use my iPhone with a bluetooth keyboard.

There is also the discrepancy between the shift option left arrow behaviour on mac compared with that on IOS and iPad IOS in that mac will highlight to the start of the previous word, IOS will highlight the space before the word too. I'm not sure why this exists. Seems like a bug to me and, I just find it indicative of the toyish nature of the iPad.

It's not just us though. I don't know very many people who will work serious on iPad. It's good for browsing, reading documents, some emails, but you're far better off with the base end MBA m4 for productivity, which is thinner, I think, than iPad air and magic keyboard and the Ipad pro and magic keyboard.

iPad is a fun little device. I don't ever see apple making it good enough to be a singular device for most professionals. They want us to buy both an iPad and MacBook.

I've got an ipad air m3 with a magic keyboard at the beginning of this month, ultimately though, I returned it about 9 days later, I won't lie and say that the decision didn't hurt a little, there are things that I genuinely loved about it, like how the view in the ipad with most apps get split in two, for example, discord will show servers/channels on one side, while showing messages on the other, mail showing messages on one side, while showing the currently selected message on the other, pretty fancy stuff, but I ultimately returned it because it didn't feel as comfortable as an iphone for touch based tasks, while not feeling as comfortable as a macbook for keyboard related tasks, considering about 80% of apps are literally iphone apps with split view, well it wasn't groundbreaking tbh, and. I feared I might kick myself once the newness factor wares off, so I returned it.
for the price it's overkill, the ipad price alone is fine, ipad air being $500, but once you bring the keyboard into account, it starts getting dangerously close to laptop taratory, hell, probably could get good quality laptop running arm on windows with that, or an m2 macbook air, with double ram and storage, there are the roomers that ipad OS 19 will improve the multitasking experience, but I ultimately decided I wouldn't test out my luck because it's either just overhyped icon styling changes with some tiny features that no one really cares about, or it'll be limited to the ipad pro, or even worse, limited to a newly released modle, because that's totally something apple would do.

Name one writing app that reliably lets you move to and read the next/previous paragraph. That used to be Option+Up or Down Arrow. This worked fine on my 4th gen iPad running iOS 10.3.3. When I upgraded to the iPad Pro, moving to next paragraph only read the final line of the paragraph, which rendered it pretty much useless for writing.

Sadly, we're starting to see the same issues on MacOS, as if there's some kind of unified effort to prevent blind users from reading by paragraph. Writing is degrading rapidly on all Apple platforms, and it has caused me to seriously consider purchasing a Windows platform for the first time in ten years.

I use Subtext and write everything in Markdown. The CMS that I use takes this as input and then parses it to HTML.
And I forgot to mention that I proofread exclusively with a Braille display, which means that every time I do some stuff on the iPad that goes beyond media consumption, the Braille display is connected.
So I‘m not aware of wrong announcements by the speech output. With BRaille, the iPAd has less issues than the Mac currently has, for example.