I recently saw a video by “The blind life” (youtube link) and I found it so devoid of content or anything resembling information it inspired me to write a page that does it properly.
I’ll here focus on what I have experiences with, so mostly screen readers and similar technology. I did see options for low vision accessibility in pretty much everything I used but I can’t say anything about how good they are.
If nothing I wrote above means anything to you, go with windows computer and android phone. Nobody got fired for going with windows,1 and android phones are usually cheaper and do the basic things right.
I’ve used MacOS, Windows and some linuxes. I used android, and IOS a long time ago. I’ll say a little about each as far as non-accessibility features are concerned, to know what to expect:
There are two things that also deserve a mention, even though they aren’t operating systems, but are instead more like kinds of applications that can run on most of them.
I’ll now talk about accessibility on each.
Assuming you’ve figured out where the power button is and pressed it, the first step is to turn on narrator and install another screen reader. Earlier versions of windows played a noise when they turned on, but at some point it got removed so you mostly have to guess when it’s ready, or “blindly” try one of the steps below until it works, or ask for someone to help you out.
How to turn on narrator depends on whether you’re on the log in screen or if you get logged in automatically. Here are some ways I remember working.
After this stumbling block however Windows is pretty usable. Narrator
is still quite janky but since Windows 10 it can be used full time, but
I still recommend installing another screen reader. Windows’ biggest
accessibility selling point is its screen readers and in particular how
customizeable they are. All of them have a basic help facility, pressing
insert+1 (on the number row) gets into a special mode where
you can press any key or combinations of them, and get told what it
would do. Pretty much all screen reader commands use the insert key, or
capslock if they were so configured.
Windows accessibility is hit and miss. While usually it works well, it often happens that microsoft decides to make a new thing for applications and break third-party screen readers in the process (although it gets fixed fast enough). The accessibility of their programs also leaves a lot to be desired, and screen readers often have to work hard making them work. Third party applications are somewhat better, although there are always misses especially on the microsoft store.
Chrome and firefox are available, along with their various forks. which includes microsoft edge.
It’s probably the safest bet if you aren’t familiar with any other operating system. And it has the most blind people using it so there is already a lot of add-ons and programs to make using it easier.
All apple systems have a screen reader called “Voice over” that can
be turned on at any time by pressing cmd+f5 where
cmd is the key next to the space on the left. You can get a
quick start guide by pressing ctrl+option+cmd+f8, so all
three keys next to the space bar and then f8.
The system itself is pretty much completely accessible, although voice over doesn’t interact well with the default terminal application. I recommend using tdsr if you want to use the terminal applications. Third party applications depends a lot on how they’re made. Most applications I ended up installing were quite usable, which isn’t that much.
For web browsers, there’s safari, and various google forks work quite well. I had trouble trying out firefox however. One thing to note when using chromium-based browsers is that arrow keys don’t let you move through the text like usually, not until you press f7 to get into karet browsing.
It’s biggest accessibility drawback is its screen reader, and the software available for blind people in general. Voice over has got a weird keymap that even I, who have used it for years now, struggle to remember sometimes. It’s also not very extendable, at least not without learning applescript, which, like with anything that starts with “apple”, has little to no documentation and not many people know in the first place. This makes adding new features to voice over, something very common with windows screen readers, an extreme rarity with voice over.
It was a while since I used IOS, so I can’t say much about it. Tripple pressing on the home button turns it on. It has braille screen input at least, which is much better than the normal touch keyboard, if it works. I do remember less applications being accessible however.
Android is what I’m currently using, and even though I only used two different phones until now there are quite a few difference between manufacturers. Pressing volume up and down keys together for about 3 seconds turns on the screen reader, which is talkback on most phones, and voice assistant on Samsung. Both work well enough, but they are very different in what they support.
Recent versions of talkback have a braille keyboard you can use to type text in any text field. It works great for simple things, some of the more advance things require somewhat obscure gestures but nothing too bad. Both talkback and the braille keyboard have tutorials that you can access within talkback settings.
There’s a third party screen reader called [commentary][] which seems to be pretty popular among some android users. It’s main selling point was better integration with third party braille keyboards before talkback had its own. It’s also got much more features than regular talkback, although most of those feel like bloat to me. Bigger problem with it is the fact it officially only seems to be distributed through its telegram channel and there aren’t many guides on how to use it. What I want to say is, using it isn’t as seemless as, say, NVDA or JAWS are on windows.
Situation with third party applications might be the worst on any mainstream platform, if it’s not a top 100 application made by a big tech company it’s not likely to be accessible at all. What’s worse, some programs seem to work well on one phone but not at all on others, and I’ve noticed that some of them, particularly mobile games, like to make their own screen reader that bypasses talkback completely, include the talkback braille keyboard. At least web browsers work well enough which let’s you use web applications. Unfortunately termux isn’t usable by talkback, so it’s not possible to use terminal applications on android.
Linux accessibility is a more complex topic which probably needs a
page on its own. Linux mint and ubuntu come with orca by default, which
can be activated using alt-super-s. The base system is
usually accessible, all web browsers are to my knowledge, but other
third party applications can be a hit or miss. Just like on MacOS, I
recommend using a terminal screen reader instead of orca, again, tdsr is the one I use, but yasr and fenrir work too.
Many applications today aren’t tied to one specific operating system, because they all run inside a web browser2 which itself is cross platform.
Since most web applications are text with some links and buttons thrown in, screen readers handle them pretty well. Every screen reader has a way to navigate through the web page, usually by headings, links, and plain text. The exact shortcuts differ, but they are usually a single letter identifying the element which to go to next and pressing shift along with the letter goes to the previous instance of that element.
It’s also possible to use the common shortcuts to navigate through text on the web page. One that often comes useful is find text which quickly let’s you find a specific part of a webpage if it’s not easy to reach otherwise.
Some very big applications like google’s office suite and office 365 have their own issues with accessibility. In particular the former needs the user to press a button to activate accessibility mode.
This article is a work in progress, I know it’s not very clearly written and should probably have more information on how to use it after turning on the screen reader.
However, I hope that it has at least given you an idea of how they work, and that it has given you an idea of which one to pick.