VMWare recently announced a 2023 technical preview for Fusion on silicon-based Macs. I didn’t have success with earlier previews on that platform with Fusion so have been using Parallels for now. This was a good opportunity to try Fusion again.
My efforts this time around were successful. I’ve now created multiple VMs under Fusion on an M1 MacBook Pro. Here is what I had to do.
- Create a new VM and point to a Windows 11 ARM ISO.
- Start the machine.
- The first challenge of the experience happened here. The VM started but launching Narrator, I had no screen reader speech. Thankfully a USB sound device plugged into the Mac and made available to the Windows VM solved this problem. Note, this external USB device was only necessary until the first reboot during OS install.
- I then used Narrator to start going through the OOBE (out of box experience) where you pick the edition of Windows, add and account and such.
- Note, I hit an issue here where there was no networking support available. To work around this I:
- Press shift+F10 to get a cmd prompt from the setup experience.
- Told VMWare I wanted to install VMWare tools. This inserts the virtual CD for these tools and is launched from the Virtual Machine menu in Fusion.
- Entered d: in the run dialog in Windows. The virtual CD for VMWare tools was inserted in that drive and this kicked off the automatic launching of the installer.
- Used Narrator to install VMWare tools in Windows and rebooted.
- Went through OOBE again. A reboot during the process causes you to have to start over.
- Perhaps most importantly, with a big thank you to the person who shared this tip with me, in the settings for the virtual machine, turned off hardware acceleration for the video display. This had a dramatic positive impact on the use of JAWS in this Vm.
Working with virtual machines, screen readers and multiple operating systems has a lot of moving parts. If you have any tips or techniques that have worked for you, share them in the comments.
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