Disclaimer, I am merely seeking input on this topic. This is not meant to be a debate over which operating system is best, or which screen reader is superior.
It seems to me that over the course of the past several years, that VoiceOver for macOS has taken a severe nose dive. Back when I was in college, the only Mac computers were Intel-based. Each operating system under the OSX label, and then later macOS had its quirks, but overall Intel Macs were amazing. macOS is a very efficient system. I used to be able to get my work done proficiently, and effectively, with very little downtime on my Intel-based MacBook Pro. And for those times I needed to work within the Windows environment, well there was always BootCamp...
I don't care what the virtual machine enthusiasts say, nothing beats BootCamp. Nothing.
I still think macOS is an efficient operating system, however somewhere along the way VoiceOver has taken a turn for the worst. I used to be able to navigate webpages flawlessly. If I wanted to read a block of text, I would simply arrow through it, either with VO plus arrow keys, or later by simply using the arrow keys when that became an option. Lately, I come here to AppleVis and read posts about people not being able to navigate webpages. Where VoiceOver is skipping entire paragraphs. Or reading by characters, words, lines, etc. is nye impossible in a web browser. Where word processing is an epic failure.
Again, this is not a macOS thing. This is a VoiceOver thing. I am quite sure that the sighted world does not have these issues with macOS.
My question is, when did all of this happen? If we were to retrace the timeline of all of these quirks, where would the starting point be? Personally, I am beginning to think that it started with the introduction of the M series chips. This, if I am not mistaken, would've also been the introduction of macOS Monterey. My current MacBook Pro, retired as it may be, is actually running Monterey on it. I think it's something like version 12.7.2, or thereabouts. And Monterey runs pretty well on that old device. I also am aware that Catalina was where we first saw SNR, although it was "Siri busy", rather than "Siri not responding".
What do you all think? When did all this start? Are there workaround for some of these more debilitating quirks, such as not being able to navigate webpages properly?
Please discuss.
Edited for typos
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I started my mac journey in 2023. And oh my gosh there were things to learn, adapt, or worst, accept as it or use linux shell alternative (text).
I am also very very interested in the answers.
To give credit where credit is due.
Again, even if it's positive spamming from me, I couldn't thank João Santos enough, even if he may not even remember.
It's only thanks to him that I felt that I was not alone being frustrated by seeing the horrible design / systemic problems of VoiceOver on mac. It's 90% because of him I originally had the motivation to beta test on my mac and provide feedbacks here and / or to apple.
Despite the real pains, I've become more educated than I was before getting my mac about accessibility and its meaning for us long term.
One thing only
Snow leopard was the most stable out of many updates that were released! That and Mountain Lyon, After that is when stuff started to hit the fan as it were. I also do not care what people say about VM. Bootcamp is the most superior experience you're gunna get with windows. Not none of this VM garbage. I'll stick with my 2015 macbook pro for as long as I can just for that reason and reason alone. You can't do as much on a VM as you can with bootcamp and I use a lot of stuff that you cannot do with a VM by far.
Always been bad for me
I went blind in 2014 so have no experience with VoiceOver or any other screen reader whatsoever from before then, my daily driver back then was a late-2011 apex 15" MacBook Pro, and those first years of VoiceOver were quite rough. Things have actually been improving slowly, but very old bugs from that time still linger, and while some stability issues may result from the architecture switch, the reason for that is just bad code.
In terms of web navigation, back then you couldn't even do anything even close to caret browsing meaning that reading code on a web page was an exercise in patience, browsing any reddit thread with close to or more than 50 comments would consistently make Safari grind to a halt, and most of the problems felt today were already present. In terms of sound, audio ducking was a total train wreck since VoiceOver would often duck itself instead of everything else, which up to this day I still think that it takes a special level of incompetence to accomplish. Stability was also pretty bad, to the point that the simple act of writing code in Xcode would cause random and frequent screen-reader crashes, the `NSTextView` problem in which only the text in the same visible line as the caret is reported to accessibility was already manifesting. Features like indentation announcement weren't even a thing yet so I just avoided Python and YAML. So yes,, things were already bad 11 years ago.
The accessibility infrastructure on macOS is a fractal of bad design. The API itself derives from the Carbon framework, which was introduced to ease the transition from classic macOS to macOS X, however it fails to provide thread-safety even in situations when Carbon itself makes thread-safety mandatory or at least reasonable to expect. Then there's the blocking design in which every accessibility call prevents its thread from doing anything else while waiting for applications to respond, which makes no sense at all considering that all the frameworks that the accessibility infrastructure depends on provide an asynchronous interface to the Mach Ports used for inter-process communication. At a higher level, Apple seems to make a very liberal use of all kinds of accessibility identifiers, many of which they even stopped declaring so in some cases the only way to discover them is through reverse-engineering, and a few core system services don't even implement accessibility right.
All in all my opinion is that things have actually been improving even if extremely slowly, and having deep first-hand experience reverse-engineering the accessibility infrastructure, I can easily tell that most of these symptoms result from years and years of neglect and accumulated technical debt that is likely making developers at Apple weary of touching anything accessibility-related. The explosion of parallel processing resulting from the increase in the overall number of CPU cores exacerbates lingering multithreading problems, and the switch to ARM, which doesn't guarantee ordered memory visibility by default for performance reasons whereas x86 does for legacy reasons, may also contribute to the manifestation of stability problems in broken legacy multithreaded code, so nothing short of a full rewrite will contribute to any meaningful improvement.
Snow Leopard, and beyond
I think many would agree that OSX Snow Leopard was one of the best versions of Mac OS X that was ever released. Interestingly enough, that was the version of OSX that I learned VoiceOver on. Unfortunately, by the time I actually received my first Mac computer, it was running OSX 10.9 (Mavericks). I, believe, macOS X was still running in 32 bit mode at this point in time. Regardless of any issues back then, I was able to navigate websites, perform word processing, send and receive emails, chat with my family and friends via the Messages application, and have music playing in the background with iTunes confidently, back when iTunes was a thing.
Of course, I am not downplaying any of the issues @João Santos mention above. Simply saying that I could function with macOS back then, I do not think I can function with it now. I'm basing this off of my own skill set. And patience or lack there of.
I said this in my original post, but BootCamp absolutely outweighs anything a virtual machine can produce. For those of us who are gamers, all I can say about this is that while running Windows via BootCamp, we actually have full DirectX support and functionality. AAA games on a virtual machine? Forget about it!