As to VMWare, well, given they've said some fairly unflattering things about non-enterprise customers following the Broadcom acquisition and given they'll move to subscriptions, I'd get ready to look elsewhere, even as a predominantly Linux user. Apparently FS/VFO (or whatever they're called nowadays) are contemplating an ARM build of JAWS and even have Mac users in mind if not consideration.

You can use Intel apps on Windows for ARM, yes, but not JAWS which needs drivers. Best of all it's free, so you can always try both and see if UTM fits your needs, if it does, it's certainly easier to set up and work with using VoiceOver. UTM is fully accessible with VoiceOver without having to use VOCR, but in places is a little harder to setup and has a few more bugs with Windows, since it is an open source implementation driven by mainly a few active developers, but it is also a good option and has improved a lot recently. There is also a free option instead of Parallels called UTM.

If you decide to go for it, you can ask more specific questions and I'd be happy to answer and provide help.

There are a few more details I could mention like a few shortcut conflicts you will have to get around, but generally, once you set the VM up, it works for all your basic tasks, and things you might be missing from the Mac such as audiogames. It could happen that VoiceOver and NVDA talk at the same time, if for example a notification comes in and VoiceOver reads it while you are doing something on Windows, but of course you can always mute speech in VO temporarily. This shouldn't scare you though, the OCR is really good and not hard to use at all.Ībout 2 screen readers, your Windows screen reader will never be able to read the content of your Mac OS, since it doesn't even know about it. After that, it's possible to start or shut a VM down without VOCR. In fact, you need VOCR for everything in the first time setup, to sign in to your account and create a VM.

I'm pretty sure that once you are on an insider build, you can wait for the latest stable release, and then leave the insider program and use it that way, though I never tried this latter possibility. In fact, the only reason you even need to be on insider builds is because Microsoft doesn't provide Iso files for the ARM version of Windows as regular releases, but rather as a testing preview. Both are fine to use with Parallels, you can use them as you like. Insider preview is a kind of beta of Windows releases, where you have 2 different channels, dev, less stable and with frequent updates, and beta, more stable and not so frequent updates. It's far from ideal, but if you need it, it is certainly usable.įirst of all, you absolutely must use Windows 11 insider preview builds for the best performance, but more importantly because that is the only way to legally get an ARM version of Windows.

Mac m1 parallels