What is The Best Text Editor for Novel Writing ON Mac With Good Accessibility?

i'm not sure why text editing apps are that worst with the accessibility on mac, and there are not good alternatives as well. what we can do is, we can write a list of bugs faced by voiceover users on mac using ms word in the format of a best selling novel and spamm their inbox with our mails. 😂😂 but yeah, no hopes on apple accessibility team though, atleast not sooner. they are busy in pampering there child so called apple intelligence. so fingers crossed for microsoft now !

To be honest I’ve had absolutely no issues with Microsoft Word using voice over

Navigation is a delightful experience, and using most if not All functionality of word is a pleasurable experience. I can even go as far as to say that it’s more easier to navigate on Mack , compared to using the same application on windows.

The spellcheck, Word count, Anne etc are easier to find on the Mac version of Word, it’s easy to save documents into where you want them, and All in all it’s an okay experience.

Can you please tell me what issues you experiencing? Disclaimer, this is my own experience, using macOS 15 beta with VoiceOver, and Microsoft Word for macOS , latest version downloaded from the Mac App Store,. I’m also running Microsoft Word on my windows desktop with NVDA 2024.1

Your experience may differ to mine

Have a good rest of your day, or night

When using Scrivener, you would organize sections or chapters by folder and subfolder, with heading text as the folder name. Then, to navigate by heading, you flip over to the folder view and nav up or down or use first letter navigation. You can easily toggle between viewing the whole document or the current section or chapter. So, in theory, it might work for you.

The iOS app works great, using Dropbox for storage, and it’s a great solution when I need to write on the go.

But now for the cons.

Scrivener is incredibly complex. Although it is accessible per se, it is inaccessible by virtue of its complexity. I learned to use it while I still had some residual vision. I suspect I wouldn’t have the patience to learn it now that I’m total.

Navigating the folder hierarchy has issues. No way to know what level you’re at in the hierarchy except to rely on your own wits. When moving a folder, there’s scant feedback about where you’ve moved it to.

Scrivener comes with some wonderful default templates, and I’ve used both short story and novel templates, and they work great. But, inevitably, there is some minor customization I’d like to perform, and I’d rather have a colonoscopy than wade through the obfuscated settings dialogs. They have an utterly inscrutable system of styles and formats that, after six years of use, I still find baffling. I’ve found the online community to be of little help, especially with respect to accessibility.

With each new MacOS release, VoiceOver seems to change or break in some new unpredictable way. As an example, when you add and name a new folder, VoiceOver refuses to read its name. As another example, after you Command+K to add a link to your text, The VoiceOver command to read by paragraph will only read the first word of the paragraph. Any of this weirdness can be worked around by restarting VoiceOver and/or Scrivener.

That’s about it.

Just as a point of comparison, I’m currently learning MS Word on the Mac, and after months of use, I still find it unpredictable and challenging to use. I can’t even change the font reliably.

Considering how expensive these applications are it is quite upsetting how sub-par they are.

My worry is that there is only so much you can do with the Mac to make text editing OK.

I think to genuinely write something that is a good experience for us is going to be a hell of a lot of effort. But I'd love to see it of course.

If people once again feel the need to have dedicated apps crafted for them (myself included) for something as simple as text editing, on mac.
The irony is that word on windows will actually give you most of what you are looking for, especially easy and reliable navigation with screen reader without or with minimum distraction.
If everything in terms of formatting could be done 100% with markdown than vim or similar would in theory be a nice option.
PS: is it normal to feel almost guilty when on other people threads say we complain too much about mac and it's a user fault like if we are the ones doing something wrong? Very toxic... I mean. I am a dev and geek so I don't care I have workarounds of workarounds that work when I absolutely need to be on my mac for longer text editing but still.
While we're still on text editing, what's this weird bug with narrator, nvda and even jaws on windows in only this website message field where ctrl arrows for word navigation output us half cut / concatenated words?

Thirty-one years of PDF, and there's still no reliable way to read them accessibly.

The latest thing I ran into was what would have been a table in Word, but after export to PDF, it was just random unrelated text. PDFs apparently have no concept of tables. VoiceOver seems unable to determine reading order from placement on the page, so it reads the text in whatever order it appears in the PDF. And the PDF format allows text in any order. If you wanted, you could order the text bottom to top, and VoiceOver would happily read it that way.

I could go on, but right now I'm experiencing some kind of bug with text fields in which VoiceOver strips the last letter off each word. Sigh.

Writing Markdown in the text editor of your choice should be entirely adequate for creating a novel.
Cot Editor, TextMate, TextEdit, Visual Studio Code, Vim, Emacs and probably more are all options, and each has its proponents. When finished, run Pandoc to convert to HTML, PDF, word processor formats, or whatever is wanted. Homebrew can conveniently be used to install everything needed.

Thanks for your most interesting post.
I am a writer and also trying to find the best package.
I can use both Pages and Word, but find Word easier to navigate.
There are issues with both however.
I find when I get to the bottom of a page in Word, it sort of skips backwards or similar, hard to describe.
I find spell checker a bit better in Word.
The navigation is easier in word than in Pages.
An advantage, especially regarding formatting on the Mac, is that one of the recent voiceover functions can insert an audible indent, so that when you are scrolling line by line, the indent will be spoken.
The reason I stopped writing on the Mac, and I am not sure if you found this, but there is a slight lag when typing or reading back.
This lag is not there for JAWS on Windows.
I increased the speed of voiceover, but words are difficult to make out if above say sixty percent.
If you are writing a book that is 80k, I think you could write it quicker using JAWS and Windows if you are experiencing a similar lag on the keyboard as I described above.
Please let me know if you get a slight lag.
Dr Blinder, UK.

Hey Ollie,

Found something for you. Check out the links below and decide for yourself if any will suit your needs. These are, reportedly, ,VO friendly. 🙂
Also, apologies if any of these have already been suggested.

Bear:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bear-markdown-notes/id1016366447

iA Writer:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ia-writer/id775737590?mt=12

* WPS Office:
https://www.wps.com/office/mac/
* Note: This software is supported up to macOS 13 Ventura. Still, thought someone could use it.)

I don't know if it has always been like this or if it's VO that broken it, but my biggest problem with it with the one of paging was that when we navigate from left to write in an indent block before the text it would read the content of the next line and the content of the previous line above where the cursor when we go backward (left arrow) in that same indent block?
PS: sorry it's little bit off topic but still about text editing so...

I haven't tried Bear on the Mac, but at least with iOS, it's barely usable with Voiceover. There's something that keeps refreshing, and the buttons, at least on the app's opening screen, don't appear to work.
I've heard good things about iA Writer, and believe there's a trial version you can get for the Mac, but not for iOS, and I'm very reluctant to pay around $50.00 US for it at the moment until I know for certain it's going to meet my needs.

Hope this helps.

Kelly

Got most of those links from Macworld. Do not have much experience with them, but wanted to offer my 2 pennies. 😇

Firstly, VoiceOver with Safari is now doing weird things in the comment box here. It messes up spell check for longer words. It feels to me like they are getting hyphenated or something and then the two parts are being checked independently. But it makes checking text really annoying. A few people were commenting on the problem on Windows in the Glide thread I think.

Re feeling guilty - I am always so surprised when someone says they are having a good experience and not coming across all the problems I have all the time. I'd love to understand what they are doing differently. Maybe it's the difference between a casual user and someone trying to earn a living. I also wonder if my own pesonal views are skewed because I'm comparing using a Mac sighted vs using it blind, as opposed to being a seasoned screen reader user who knows both systems well.

But yes it's crazy if we are talking about writing our own text editor, although not sure if it was originally suggested in jest.

I tried a number of plain text editors like Text Mate, CotEditor, Smultron, VS Code, that expensive one made by Panic whose name I forget, and a bunch of inaccessible ones like BBEdit, UltraEdit and Sublime Text. None of them quite hit the spot for me. I use Smultron but I do find navigating around the text a massive chore. thanks to VoiceOver I guess they could all be used for novel writing but I'm not sure any of them would be a good fit.

One thing that did occur to me is that there is a technical documentation IDE made by Jetbrains called Writerside:. I've not used it but I presume it builds on the markdown support in IntelliJ. I write simple markdowns in PyCharm and it's fine. You can navigate by headings using Cmd+Shift+up and down I think. (Basically the keys for navigating function definitions). Presumably it also has git support so you should be able to easily store things locally then sync with the cloud.

PyCharm is largely accessible for what I need to do so I would imagine that it would work fine. I'm not sure how good it would be for an actual novel but throwing it out there just in case.

In the Guides section on AppleVis, I've made 4 guides to using Pages with VoiceOver on Mac. I do some writing as well and Pages is very powerful as a word processor.

Not only do I write in plain text files (typically Markdown, LaTeX, or HTML, depending on the project), but I also maintain them in Git repositories. This provides a full history and all the advantages of a modern revision control tool. Some editors (Emacs, Vim, TextMate, VSCode) support Git directly or with extensions, but it's often easier simply to use it from the shell prompt.

What about Ulysses? For the geeks, there's also Emacs, Emacspeak, and Org-mode.