Re: Macs rearing their heads again.
My biggest gripe with VoiceOver is the performance on the web. I find it gets bogged down very easily. Any relatively complex website, like YouTube or Facebook and you're looking at VO taking a noticeably long time to react to your commands, often to the point you'll hear a lot of busies as Safari catches up with you. Do a read all on a site, like a news article, and 25% of the time you can expect the reading will randomly skip down a couple of lines, or get stuck somewhere and not continue
Chrome is even slower for VO, clearly the accessibility support is less optimised there so the performance is even worse. Because I spend the majority of my time on the web, I found VoiceOver to get in my way more than it was helping. The other reason I'm slowly gravitating away from the platform isn't strictly accessibility related and is more about the direction Apple's going with it by making it more like iOS by introducing requirements like notorisation exercising more control over what software you can run on it.
For Word and Excel, back when I had to do a lot of word processing, Word wasn't accessible and I used Pages which worked pretty well accessibility wise. However, you can't edit a word file in place, so it might visually look slightly different so it won't work for colaborative work. Now, both Word and Excel have accessibility on the Mac, which should definitely handle the basics but I'm not sure how well the more advanced aspects, particularly of Excel, would work. Last I heard most people still did more advanced Microsoft Office work in a Windows VM but someone else could tell you more and it might be worth asking about Microsoft Office on Applevis.
Lastly, any native Mac apps that have work put in them to be accessible do work great. All the built-in apps like mail or notes, social media like Twitteriffic, audio Hijack, LaunchBar for productivity which I still haven't found a good Windows equivllent of, all make the platform really great to use. Mac OS itself has some cool features, like a system-wide spellcheck, integration with an iPhone to call and text, and all of these are definitely big pluses.
So, if you're planning to be doing a lot of advanced Web or Excel work, I'm not sure a Mac is the best choice. But for many other tasks, you might very well be fine with one. Honestly both platform have things going for them and it's really all down to your usecase.
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