Mastodawn

Marco Zehe May 4

I was on a podcast! The good people at @doubletap invited me to talk all about Mac versus PC. And we had a very balanced conversation. Watch it here, or find it in your podcatcher of choice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJgc0-RwzFY&feature=youtu.be

Mac Versus PC: Choosing the Right Computer For Blind Users

YouTube

Dickson Tan 5d ago

@marco @doubletap I really enjoyed that podcast. I've been thinking about getting an M5 air with 24GB of memory for iOS development and virtualization, but am still apprehensive about the "not responding" horror stories I've heard, and the reputation of web browsing being less efficient. On the other hand, learning how to use a Mac would be useful since I'm in software development, and there's also Emacspeak which I've heard good things about. Is an M-series Mac your daily driver?

Marco Zehe 5d ago

@neurrone @doubletap Yes, I totally switched to the Mac three years ago. I don't even have Windows installed in a VM any more. Or rather, never had on this iMac. It's an M3 iMac, and I also own a MacBook Neo. As I said in the podcast, I don't experience the "not responding“ problem. For me, pages load fine in both Safari and Firefox. I don't know anything about Emacspeak, other than that it exists. Your best bet for software development is probably VS Code for many languages like JavaScript, Python, Go, PHP or whatever. Xcode of course is essential for iOS development. And yes, I'd recommend an M5 MacBook Air rather than a Neo for that, since for Xcode and more complex stuff, the M5 with 24 Gigs sounds very comfortable. Also, the MacBook Air is very portable. And in Terminal, you have a native Unix-style environment.

Dickson Tan 5d ago

@marco @doubletap I'll probably take the plunge. Heard another positive report about the Neo working well with Voiceover and no hangs so I'll probably buy it.

I thought of getting the 16GB but didn't want to risk not having enough memory. Paying the equivalent of US$234 for that additional 8GB + the 2 more GPU cores is painful though.

Marco Zehe 5d ago

@neurrone @doubletap Yeah, the Neo would probably be enough for most simpler development tasks, and XCode would also run fine, but more involved and complex setups will definitely overwhelm its 8 GB of memory. So, an M5 Air with 16 or 24 GB is a good way to go, although I realize your pain regarding the higher memory and such.

Dickson Tan 5d ago

@marco @doubletap The Neo is very tempting though, it is so much cheaper. I'll sleep on it for a few days more. If I only intend this to be a build machine / XCode then that'll do. But if I'm serious about being productive with it and trying to see if it can become my daily driver, I'll probably run into the 8GB memory limitations quickly.

Matt Campbell 5d ago

@neurrone @marco @doubletap For what it's worth, I was chatting the other day with someone who programs in Rust on a 2009 MacBook with 8 GB of RAM. The Neo with 8 GB will likely be fine.

Matt Campbell 5d ago

@neurrone @marco @doubletap Also keep in mind that the MacBook Neo, even with only 8 GB of RAM, has both compression of inactive pages and a swap file, to make that 8 GB go further than it otherwise would.

Marco Zehe 5d ago

@matt @neurrone @doubletap Yes, that is definitely true. MacOS manages these 8 GB very efficiently. That's why it's recommended to look at the memory pressure indicator in Process Monitor rather than the number of free vs. occupied memory. The lower the pressure, the less strain.

@marco @matt @doubletap Meanwhile on Windows land, 16GB feels like the absolute minimum just to get a good baseline experience because of how inefficient the base OS is.

Dickson Tan 3d ago

@marco @matt @doubletap I had the chance to use an Air for a few minutes earlier today and tried quick navigation for web browsing. Is there a version of this mode that allows it to work more like NVDA? I.e, no having to constantly interact? I obviously don't have experience but think that interaction is going to be a large efficiency tax compared to how NVDA or Jaws implements browse mode.

James Scholes 3d ago

@neurrone Interaction is a key part of how VO works on the Mac in general. You can avoid it in some situations by using alternative navigation techniques, e.g. tabbing instead of moving the VO cursor, searching for items, using window spots, etc.

On the web specifically, the single-key navigation works quite similarly to its counterparts in JAWS and NVDA, e.g. H/Shift+H for next/previous heading. Some of the letters are different, and the choice of elements it's possible to jump by is a tad arbitrary.

Pitermach 3d ago

@jscholes @neurrone @marco 2 things I would add to this, while you're in this mode one major difference is you don't then move by line with up and down arrow and are instead pressing right and left which moves by element, which will be an link/control/landmark or paragraph of text, basically the same way you're flicking through websites on iOS. With quicknav off it's technically possible to use up and down to read by line at least in Safari and Chrome and this is also how you select text by holding down shift, but this isn't using a virtual buffer like NVDA and JAWS and may not always read everything so you'll be using quicknav 99% of the time. Second, interacting shouldn't be something which will come up on the web for the most part, it's something which comes up much more often in native apps. On the web you may occasionally need it to enter a toolbar, listbox or table in more complex apps, but for the most part other than interacting with the web content you won't need it. shortcuts

Marco Zehe 3d ago

@jscholes @neurrone And you can customize them to be more to your liking, to for example make it even more resemble JAWS or NVDA.

Marco Zehe 3d ago

@neurrone @matt @doubletap There is a setting in VoiceOver Utility that makes VoiceOver automatically interact with the web content when the page loads. You can then just use quick navigation as you would with JAWS or NVDA. Either turn it on by default, or turn it on in the browser only via an activity, or via shortcut VoiceOver+Q for just single letter quick navigation, or left and right arrows pressed simultaneously to turn on single letter quick nav plus VoiceOver navigation via arrow keys without the need for VoiceOver modifiers.

Dickson Tan 3d ago

@marco @matt @doubletap thanks, that sounds good enough to what I was hoping for.