Not all of us want or need Linux,either.

SLJ, plus 1,couldn't have said it better myself.

Ethin, applevis is applevis,this is this, and I haven't seen an attitude like that on this topic,at least.
Most people responding have used  IOS Android,MAC os or windows, if not all,then at least 2 of these OS's, and having used them, they are allowed to have an opinion on their experiences, unfortunate that they may not agree with yours or someone elses.

Apple is controlling, in something where it does not need to be,that's true and many obviously don't like it as well,but for some others, I.E Eloquence, its simply not possible,and believe me, I'd love eloquence on ios more than anything else.

Talking of how restrictive/close apple is,and how open android is...
I only need the default browser on IOS, by the closed and controlling apple btw,that allows basic extensions on its browser(Addblockers etc),and on the open android system where anything at all is possible, I can't do it on the default crome browser by google,the main developers of android and need another browser if I don't want my open phone vibrating like crazy or such.

What we come down to, here is each has its plus and minus points, although I lean more towards IOS,
Iphones the Itunes sync, although there are ways you can not deal with itunes interface,not much anyway,and get by if that's what you want,without jalebreaking for IOS, and jalebreaking isn't needed much now anyway, hardly any instences I can think of right now to jalebreak my phone. but yes, not eazy as attach,copy, paste
Android's needing a billion apps installed to do a single thing, good and improved accessibility but obviously not good as apples, and a spin of a lotto wheel whether the device you get has accessibbility,although now its more the question of how good it is on the device you get.

Grryf

Hello,
Speaking of web browsing and emailing, I agree that Voice Over has some advantages comparing to Talkback, such as more navigation modes and easy text selection. On Android it could be a bit harder, but it's not impossible. GMail application is accessible, but I don't like the interface so I've got AquaMail which is the most accessible email client on Android and deleting messages is simple as tapping on a selector to the left of each message and choosing delete.
But you guys who constantly complain about Android's eas of use, look at iTunes. It took me a bunch of time tabbing through the iTunes interface and finding a right place just to transfer a stupid recording to my PC. I'm using my device for listening to music and recording stuff as well, so it's really counterproductive for me to waste my time just to copy a single file onto device. The only thing that Apple allows you to do via copy-paste is transfering your pictures and videos, which is very important for a totally blind person . I agree that Android's openness has it's bad sides, but at least you can do many more things and transfering files is as simple as finding a device in Windows Explorer and copying-pasting a file or folder. And using 3rd-party apps is something that sighted people do as well, because even on Windows you will certainly use a better web browser than Internet Explorer or Microsoft Edge. I don't believe that Windows Narrator will ever support third-party apps, since Microsoft is focusing only on accessibility of their own apps, so NVDA will be step further for a long time.
Have you ever asked yourself why iOS apps are more expensive than Android apps? Well, read my post number 24 again and you will know the answer. XCode which is used for developing iOS apps probably requires a better Mac computer, which is far from cheep, and XCode doesn't run on Windows.
Yes, Voice Over is nice for what it does, at least on iOS, but some people don't use their phones only for calling, messaging and mailing. Some people want a lot more, so in my opinion iPhone or iPad is definitely not a device for more advanced users who want the most of their devices.So, my message to Apple is: Give me removable storage, allow me to develope apps on Windows for a smaller fee, give me SD card support, give me more TTS choices and you will get me.

Yep that's why I've purchased the phone running Android One platform. It's Google's stock Android with no modifications, with regular security updates and very low price. So it's quite possible that I'll be getting Android Orio much before e.g. Gallaxy S8 users.

you know, I'll never get why apple users, for the most part I'm not saying all of them see talkback and by extension android as a piece of garbage that's just been handed to them by a ranting, filthy hobo that stinks of piss. For some I guess their first accessible mobile experience was the iPhone and they literally can't see how it could get any better Even  though it can. I could name many things that would improve the iOS experience but apple just don't want to know implementing these kinds of things runs counter to their lock users in, make them buy from apple approved services and make them use apple MFI accessories mindset that drives them. But For folks like me, who had been using phones since symbian going to voiceover and iOS was in many ways a setback. Sure the phone was pretty, and apps were nice but once the honeymoon period wore off The annoyances crept in, many of them still present today. Why are we stuck using these stupid voices their was at least a little choice back where we came from. Why is their no file manager? Why am I stuck with this stupid bright theme? Why is touch typing, bar a few changes still the way it is when it was first brought in? It's 2016 and I have to use an adapter to plug in my headphones? Wasn't I meant to be getting away from that? I have to worship at the temple of apple and give them money every year to be allowed to develop for them? Wait, xcode only runs on an expensive mac? Wait, their are no bluetooth transfers for quick and dirty file transfers between friends? I still have to use this stupid garbage piece of software to put files on the thing? I can't control where said files go? I can't buy stuff from audible or other competing services like people can on other platforms? I need to go through an extremely convoluted process to get extra ringtones on my phone? Why is it always yelling out my notifications for all to here! In those Stupid Voices! Why is it always telling me the time, What if I don't care what time it is? I um... could keep going but I'll cut it short their. Going over to android and many of those annoyances disappeared some instantly, others with a bit of configuration. Is the screen reader a bit rough? Yeah, it is but it's no way near as bad as it's getting made out to be in this thread. I have this cheap, shitty android tablet that cost me all of $65 that got me an attam z8350,, 2 gb of ram an FHD screen with all the usual trimmings. I hammer the hell out of this tablet with emulators, teamtalk, kodi and their is an FTP server running in the background and talkback hasn't crashed on me once save for the time I screwed up installing a text to speech engine which was completely my fault. So if it runs fine on the cheapest low end hardware I really don't know what people are doing to it  to turn it into crash riddled crap.

My perspective on which OS to use is: Use what you like, it's your choice. IMHO there is absolutely no use of a fanboys vs fanboys topic. do we use Windows, Linux, IOS, Android, etc. The truth is, there are so many things that establish and change perspective that it seems silly to think we can control the resultant opinions. IF there was one best that we could argue for, if there was some objective way to measure the best operating system, then great. But there isn't.

Myself, I've used Windows all my life and have never tried Mac or Linux. I'd like to try Mac at some point for various reasons, but haven't gotten around to thinking about the easiest way to make that work. As for Linux and other operating systems like it, I have little interest in learning a new operating system with the reputation Linux seems to have. A lot of people who get into Linux seem to be of the type who like experimenting, who like to do things in a different way than most other people, or who have specific goals in mind that Windows or some other operating system struggle to manage. That's largely not my thing. But if someone makes me aware of a possible usage that interests me which is more practical with Linux or something like it, then I will consider trying to learn it, but I still don't know how confident or ready I would be.

So then we get to IOS and Android. I started with an IPhone in 2012. I tried it because I had heard litttle if no recommendation for Android or any other smartphone at that time. I needed an accessible cell phone, preferably a smartphone because I do enjoy using one piece of technology for a lot of purposes. There were games and apps on IOS I wanted to check out that weren't available anywhere else as well, so getting an IPhone was an easy decision. So, I bought an IPhone, well my family got it for me for Christmas. I have been using IOS for 5 years come December 16.

Yes, I've found reasons to not like it. ITunes being a bloated tab fest. However I don't use ITunes much, and when I do need to use it, I only use it for specific tasks, like sharing audio memos or other files with file sharing. I've gotten pretty quick at that, and besides I only have to do it maybe twice a month, though sometimes more often when I'm more busy. If I could use Explorer to do it, then great. But this works well enough now that I've found a way, and I don't mind so much anymore.

Sure, I can't install third-party TTS engines, but to be honest, I really don't have a big issue with Vocalizer. Having something like Eloquence would be awesome, but at this point I don't know how well it would sit with me. I've gotten so used to Vocalizer on my phone, and more recently, the new and improved Siri voices in IOS 11 betas which I really do like, though they are a bit laggy. I'm still waiting for that to be fixed, but I'm patient. If I can't have Eloquence, I'll gladly take any of those voices instead. There are far worse alternatives!

No SD card. Yeah it's annoying but the less SD cards I have, the easier for me. I lose them all the time. So I've managed to work around no SD card.

More expensive prices for apple devices. That could be a problem in future depending on a lot of things. Who knows? For now it isn't, since my family are able to afford getting new phones every two or three years. My mom has an IPhone as well, and she normally takes my old one so I can get the new. As for other people on our plan, there is only one other family member and he has an Android which he pays for. So when we upgrade, we only end up having to purchase one new IOS device instead of two, which is nice IMHO. Also, our plan allows us to pay our phones off as part of our bill so the immediate impact of the higher price isn't felt so much.

What keeps me liking IOS is that while there are things that annoy me, I am still so used to it, I feel so comfortable in it. In my opinion, Apple designed the operating system for people who want it that way. When you get an Apple device, you basically know what you're getting, with perhaps a few exceptions which are easily dealt with. Go ahead, laugh at me for being stuck in their ecosystem. I don't care.

Now, am I going to say that Android is crap? No. I actually do own an Android and I know other people who do as well. I got the Samsung Galaxy S3 Tablet about 6 weeks ago because I've had an increasing number of people asking me for help with Android. I figured why not learn it, especially since there are things on Android I've wanted to try out.

I don't think Android is crap or that it's not a worthy operating system of someone's day-to-day usage. In fact, I like it a lot. I can easily transfer files from within Explorer as was pointed out a ton throughout this topic. There is no ITunes to get in the way of that. There seem to be just as many, if not more apps for Android in certain areas because it is easier to develop for. Accessibility is good enough for basic stuff, though with that said I don't know anything about braille support or more advanced stuff on either of the two operating systems. I haven't tried Talkback but I have tried Samsung's built-in screen reader, which I'm starting to get to know pretty well. At some point, I'd like to try Talkback. I get more TTS options, in fact I'm using Eloquence on that Tablet now because I am not a big fan of the built-in speech engines for various reasons. I still have so much to learn about my Tablet, and I will do that as time permits and necessitates.

Now there are things that I really do not like about my Tablet which were never a problem with my IPhone, nor on a friend's IPad I tried a few months ago. With my Tablet, the screen is slow to respond. Flicking is not a trivial deal sometimes, I actually have to do a big flick. The audio also seems to be somewhat more laggy than IOS was. This slows me down considerably, and I've been told that with respect to the screen, Android tablets normally have issues similar to mine. A friend of mine has an Android phone which is much, much better than my Tablet in that regard. I've heard firsthand how responsive it is, and the phone is really cheap too. Maybe that's because he's using Talkback, I have no clue. By contrast, however, when I tried an IPad, the opposite would occur. The screen was so responsive that it threw me off a bit. Flicking was no less intuitive on the IPad than on the IPhone.
Another thing I don't like about my tablet is that because it's an Android, it's more open to manufacturing differences just like any PC would be. This is a good or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. My Tablet did come with a lot of Samsung apps which I have yet to try, but other venders would give you different built-in stuff and probably have things set up differently. IN general I don't mind this so long as I can do what I need to do, and delete and arrange stuff the way I want. What I specifically don't like is the way the speakers and microphone sound. I actually prefer my IPhone 7 speakers over the Tablet ones. They have a harsher sound but they're also a lot louder. With my Tablet, it feels unnaturally low all around. That's the only way I can describe it. In addition, while the Tablet has two microphones right next to each other which allows me to make stereo recordings, I still find the IPhone sounds far better in mono. I didn't know this would be the case until I got the Tablet though, and I couldn't find any recordings made with that model before I got it. Since I record all the time, this was a little disappointing. Maybe the IPhone, being more expensive, has something to do with that, but I don't really know. But this Tablet has made me appreciate how truly different two operating systems can be. I find these experiences refreshing and positive. While I will probably be partial to Apple for a while, I am not going to sit here and proclaim they are better than everyone else, because as I said at the beginning of my post, nobody can change global opinion, and everyone has as much a right to their opinion as anyone else.

post 37, with regards to your audio lag, I reckon that's samsung's screen reader at fault, probably  compounded with  the additional overhead of touchwiz. It was always a heavy android skin. My $65 cheapo special goes like hell, I'd go so far as to say it's faster under the finger than voiceover, which has always felt  the slightest bit more sluggish though I do think that is by design more than anything. Anyway, it runs stock android, no overlays or anything and the latest talkback.

The biggest mistake is that people are trying to compare iOS with some old Android version. Before complaining, get device with Android 7.1.1 or even 8.0 Orio once it comes out, and then you can say that Android's accessibility is really bad. Oh, and I haven't commented Linux yet in this topic. I love what Linux does, and how it does, but Linux accessibility is way behind other platforms, at least for GUI. I was using Arch Linux for about 4 months alone, and the first thing that I didn't like is Orca's current web support. Next, QT accessibility is far from being good. I'm doing sound editing and audio production, and none of the apps for such kind of work are accessible enough on Linux. That's why I went back to Windows, but it was very funny experience for me to work in Linux environment for 24 hours. I say good, but it's not enough for my personal needs.

@39, I have to agree with you. It seems like Gnome doesn't care about Orca very much, or, at least, no one does right now, which means accessibility is going to be... lacking for a while. I'm not sure how we're going to fix that.

Ray, I had a pretty crappy experience with my samsung galaxy tablet. It's just a bloated, slow device all around. TTalkback is a lot better speed-wise than Voice Assist, but you're still gonna want a better experience. Even the nexus 7 tablets ran better. As for bricking, this is not always the case with samsung devices, but if you have a nexus, that's pretty much impossible to hard brick. Back when I had my nexus 5 and my primary machine was a windows box, I always had an emergency flash batch script ready that, when run, would flash the out-of-box firmware of 4.4.2 on my phone, and within 5 minutes a near unbootable system was good as new. Samsung is a little harder as that's odin -based which is a dfu mode of sorts, but a galaxy tab *can* be unbricked, although sometimes requiring sighted help. Or at least it did at the time when I had to go into recovery mode to wipe the data partition, although if you have twrp you could get by with commandline operation.

@raygrote Talkback should be installed on your tablet as well. If not, you can easily get it from the Playstore.
@Jack and Hrvoje: Thanks for your replies. It sounds like mail works quite nicely on Android as well. I hear that web browsing works great in Firefox with Talkback.
So, what about Facebook? Do you know if it runs as smooth like on IOS?
I don't know what tablet my friend borrowed, but he upgraded to Android 7, which crashed Talkback so badly, so he needed to get sighted help to turn it on again.

Wait, I'm confused. According to Samsung's site, the s3 tablet comes with Android N which is about a year old. I honestly worry if a device less than a year old is already old enough to perform less optimally than something released even sooner than that. Your observations about your S8 phone hardly surprise me at this point; I know other people with far older phones who can whiz around their screens like I can on an Apple device. So I think it might be the Tablet.

Couldn't agree more!

If it's a 3rd generation galaxy tablet, the specs on that device are disappointing, and that's putting it lightly. Mine was so bad that Gazelle, a trade-site for mobile devices, would allow me to part with my galaxy tablet for...get ready...a wopping 5 bucks! So I think they proved the point that that device is only good for wiping your ass. Lol! Admittedly, that tablet ran android 4.1.2 and never got updated. As for the tablet running Nougat? Nougat is still running strong on a number of devices, it even ran pretty well on my short run of testing it on the nexus 5 that I sold on blind-bst to make sure Nougat would run well. If Android 4.4.2 doesn't give me hell, then Nougat definitely won't disappoint after only a year of release. As for Samsung's newer phones, s5 and above run a lot better. Up to speed with a nexus or one+ phone? Perhaps not, but that's thanks to the bloatware. Even though the device runs faster, there's still bloatware, the better specs just make up for it.