Accessibility of the App store of the Mac

My understanding is that similar to other Apple apps, like music and TV, this is, unfortunately, by design. While changing VoiceOver's grouping behavior might work to reduce the amount of interaction needed to navigate the interface, it might also cause other unexpected behaviors, as has been my experience when changing this setting from the default.

My best advice when navigating app interfaces like this is to attempt to develop muscle memory, so you can anticipate when you will or won't need to interact before encountering and absorbing any information. For me, I navigate right past the first couple sections, which are usually screenshots, and only interact with the “Description” and “What’s New” sections.

Hit VO-f8 to go into Voiceover Utility. Pick navigation. There's a grouping behavior popup that should be set to standard. Try the other options, see if any help. At least one person here recommended it, I don't like it much so I went back to standard.

The other thing you could do, if you found a grouping behavior that worked with the APp Store but you wanted standard everywhere else, is to set up a Voiceover activity to change that behavior when the App Store is loaded.

Good luck!

From experience, sections are named, i.e, description, information, reviews etc so you shouldn't have to interact with each section to figure out what it is. At least on the latest version of mac OS that's the case.

Don't be afraid to let them know.

It's not you. It's Catalyst, and the awful accessibility bugs it's lumbered with. My brother is literally selling his MacBook Neo because of his dissatisfaction with the Mac App Store. I think that's a bit of an overreaction, but it can't be denied that the Microsoft Store does not have the same problem, so …

As to reports, sure, do that. But I suspect this one requires more fundamental changes that the team working on the Mac App Store app couldn't just fix themselves.

I am being very careful with my wording here. When even a basic feature like the Mac App Store is not as usable as it should be, that says a lot. I am experiencing the same issue myself, and for the record, I reported it to Apple quite some time ago. Unfortunately, I am not particularly optimistic about seeing a fix anytime soon.

It's a poor indictment of Apple's accessibility commitment, to be sure. But on the other hand, I can't see myself using Windows as my primary system going forward unless there's an alternative to the GAC channel for prosumers like me.

And, just like that, we're back on the Mac-Windows debate. :)

I've always hated the first party Mac apps, other than Mail and Safari I tend to steer clear. What I would say is that most of them do seem to work better if you leave the grouping as the default. I have grouping disabled across the board but have an activity that enables it when I must use things like the App Store, or Shortcuts or whatever. Safari and Mail work fine with it disabled, but the others just tend to become a bit impossible in my experience. I spent much time shaking my fist angrily at the screen trying to find the Get button until I did this.

I've not used the App Store in a while - if I'm interested in an app I usually find it from other means, so I tend to just use the App Store for the get button. I messed around with it yesterday using Tahoe for the first time and it was mostly not as bad as I remembered. I didn't find too many instances of "Collection" that means nothing - generally just interacting and uninteracting would get me by. Use vo+left/right not up/down to browse actual apps though to avoid skipping over most. I presume they are in a grid layout.

However it does seem really difficult to find any details of an app. On the phone you can see web site links, nutrition labels and so on and I couldn't really find that on the Mac. I got to the app name, the button and maybe a one-liner, and an Artwork image that I could OCR with VO+Shift+L but otherwise it does seem quite lacking.

I presume there must be some more information somewhere?

One thing that doesn't help with the clumsy navigation but is useful to know, is that cmd and numbers will take you to the different categories. So cmd+1 goes to Discover, Cmd+8 to Updates etc.

Considering that the app store is where Apple makes its money I'm surprised at how bad the experience is. I don't think it's particularly brilliant on the phone either to be fair. But probably not so bad I'd be returning either my Mac or phone as a result.

I was shocked when I got my mac. I thought I could use the appstore on the mac as easily as on the phone. It's not as easy as It seems. I think that apple needs to work on the appstore alot, but It will take time, considering the other bugs they need to fix.

I was shocked when I got my mac. I thought I could use the appstore on the mac as easily as on the phone. It's not as easy as It seems. I think that apple needs to work on the appstore alot, but It will take time, considering the other bugs they need to fix.

I think the problem is SwiftUI or Catalyst or whatever crazy thing they're using to port all these apps between macOS and iOS. VoiceOver is designed to work with Cocoa, which to my knowledge is why applications like Mail and Safari work really well. The accessibility people at Apple aren't paying attention to the differences in the platforms and how VoiceOver works or if they are, they don't care and think it's acceptable we get this extremely clunky interface. Interaction was supposed to make things easier, but it makes things far more complex than they need to be. I don't think anyone mentioned this on the report card this time, so if nothing meaningful changes in macOS 27, we should definitely bring it up. Then again, does Apple read these things and take them seriously? All evidence thus far points to a definite no.

I might well be wrong, but I'm not sure the App Store is using Catalyst. This is the thing that allows apps to work on both the phone and the Mac isn't it? And this only works on Apple Silicon I believe. The app store has always been terrible from my experience and I don't think it has changed much since moving from my Intel Mac to Apple Silicon. It's also got an entirely different layout to the phone. So I'm not convinced it would be using this, but happy if someone wants to prove me wrong.

Swift UI is a general UI building tool that I presume is used for both. It is perfectly possible to make a good UI with Swift UI.

I think the problem is the hierarchical UI structure - collections within collections within collections. You can find this in a lot of first party Mac apps and it's always a chore to use them.

The App Store used to be a lot easier to use, and then they redesigned it in I think Mojave in 2018 to look more like the iOS version. As far as I know, Catalyst has been around for a while, even all the way back when macOS only ran on Intel processors. If it's not problems with the conversion tools, then it's most certainly a design problem the people at Apple clearly think is perfectly fine. It's such a shame, but what do you expect from the company that thought it would be a good idea to code a feature to remind you to wash your hands and then time it? I hope John Ternus turns things around, but I'm not naive enough to believe that.

Once again I need to learn to check my facts no matter how sure I am of them. From a quick Google you are right, Catalyst apps can run on Intel. I was absolutely convinced that they had to be Apple Silicon but apparently not.

It's interesting how different the interfaces are. I wonder if the Mac UI is defined separately and there's just a load of shared code between the two. Or maybe Catalyst automatically converts all headings into an incomprehensible series of nested collections on your behalf.

Apple baked Catalyst in a few first-party apps in 2019. Podcasts is another Catalyst app, but it's not so awful because the team working on it seems to care about it more, and it's arguably a showcase of what's possible. Making UIKit available to Mac apps is really only useful if you then do the work to ensure the behaviour is closer to proper Mac apps instead of just literally compiling for macOS. Apple knows this; the guidelines tell you in detail how to make your iPad app into a good Mac citizen, and structure the accessibility tree so it's not hideous. But apparently they can't find the time to take their own advice when it comes to the MAS app. This is obviously not unique to Mac Catalyst, but I don't think it's a coincidence that it generally feels worse than AppKit apps. It's somewhat like UWP, but for macOS.

Interesting you say that. A little while ago, maybe last year, my phone started playing up so I tried using the Mac Podcasts app for the first time and found it utterly confusing and slippery to navigate. I ended up rage quitting I think.

That was likely before being told to disable grouping though which may have made things easier.