The character in focus is voiced I believe you are correct. It is a mac feature.
The irony is that it is not a Mac feature. It is a feature of graphical word processors, on both Windows and OS X, that the text cursor is a thin I-beam between letters, and not under any particular letter, which is what we have for a command line interface. JAWS works hard to hide the native interface, and to emulate the traditional terminal environment. It does a good job of that, and it works well, but there is no character in focus! Your screen reader has been tricking you all these years! I am of the opinion that having more honest feedback is worth the price of getting used to things being different. This aspect of VoiceOver is not simply better or worse than what you are used to, but it is a change. You might think about why did graphical word processors move to the vertical between-the-letters I-beam cursor in preference to the traditional horizontal under-the-letter-in-focus underscore cursor. It is not just a visual thing, although that has a lot to do with. One problem with the Jaws approach is that the behavior is inconsistent when the cursor is at the very beginning of the file as compared to when it as the very end. Also, how do you discriminate between a blank document and one that consists of a single space? Obviously, people are comfortable with these exceptions. I am just making the point that the Jaws approach is not without its shortcomings.
