Customizing How NVDA Speaks

[Ricky] Hi, I am Ricky Enger, and today we're gonna check out how to make our NVDA Screen Reader sound just the way we want. We really need NVDA to be comfortable to listen to since it's the Voice we'll hear, as we do everything on our computer.

We'll be using our NVDA key in this workshop, which is our modifier key that we'll press along with other keys to do specific things. If you're not yet familiar with it, our first workshop in this series talks about that, along with a few other concepts that will be useful for what we're doing today.

You know, when we think about how NVDA sounds there's not just one thing to consider right? First, there's the voice we use. Do we want it to be a higher pitched voice, a lower pitched voice, or maybe somewhere in the middle? Once we figure that out, how fast should our computer's voice speak?

At first, it might be a little bit much to have our voice chattering away at a high speed, because as good as the voice is, it's still not quite the same as a human speaking, that can take some time to get used to. There are a couple of other things to think about too like what we hear as we type, and how to tell NVDA to be quiet.

So yeah, we have lots of options for making NVDA sound just right. Let's jump in and find out how to do it. To adjust our settings for NVDA, we'll be using the NVDA menu, to open it, we'll use our NVDA key, which is our Insert key, or Caps Lock key. So let's hold down our NVDA key and we'll tap the letter N, N for NVDA

[David] NVDA menu.

[Ricky] Yep, there it is. Now that our menu is open, we'll use our arrow keys to explore what's here. We won't explore everything today, but what's cool about this is that everything we learn about moving around in our NVDA menu works for other menus on our computer as well. So we'll press our down arrow key

[David] Preferences sub menu P.

[Ricky] Okay, preferences, that sounds good. That's what we wanna work with, but what is a sub menu? It just means that there's another set of options under our Preferences menu. For this sub menu and any other sub menus we encounter when we're using our computer, we can just press Enter to open that sub menu. So let's do it, we'll press Enter

[David] Settings... S.

[Ricky] That's the option we want, so we'll press Enter one more time.

[David] NVDA Settings, General, Normal Configuration. Dialogue, Categories list, General, 1 of 14.

[Ricky] Wow, that's a lot of info to try and take in. So let's just hit the highlights real quick. We're in a list of categories for things we can change. We're in the General category now. And there are 14 of these categories we can work with. The category we wanna work on now is how our computer's speech sounds, so let's find that. We're gonna use our down arrow key to move through this list of categories. So we'll press down arrow.

[David] Speech 2 of 14.

[Ricky] Hey, cool, we found it. Okay, so now that we're in the category we want we're going to see what options are here. We won't check out everything, but we'll use our Tab key to move through a few of these, so we'll Tab.

[Ricky] Speech property page, Synthesizer, grouping, edit, read only, multi-line, Windows OneCore voices.

[Ricky] Okay, let's Tab again.

[David] Change button, ALT + H.

[Ricky] And again, we'll Tab.

[David] Voice, combo box, Microsoft David, collapsed, ALT + V.

[Ricky] Yeah, let's stop here. Turns out that the voice we've been hearing this whole time is named David. But we do have a couple others as well. To find out what they are, let's press our down arrow key. [Zira] Microsoft Zira. [Ricky] Okay, hello Zira, glad you're here. Do we have any other voices? Let's press down arrow again.

[Mark] Microsoft Mark.

[Ricky] Cool, hi Mark. All right, we've been pressing down arrow this whole time to move through our voices, so let's press it one more time. And nothing happened, that's because we've reached the end of the voices we can choose from. Hopefully, you've heard one that you like. To move from Mark back to any of the other voices we'll use our up arrow, so I'll switch back to David on this computer just by pressing the up arrow a couple of times.

[Zira] Microsoft Zira.

[David] Microsoft David.

[Ricky] All right, there we go. Now, let's keep on moving through our options here with our Tab key, so we'll Tab

[David] Rate, slider 50, ALT + R.

[Ricky] Okay, great, this is where we'll change how fast NVDA speaks, we'll use our down arrow to slow NVDA down.

[David] 49, 48, 47.

[Ricky] And we'll use our up arrow to speed things up.

[David] 48, 49, 50.

[Ricky] And again, we just keep adjusting with our arrow keys until things sound good. Now, there are several more options here. We can adjust the pitch, we can change how punctuation is announced when we're reading, and a few other things. We can get to all those options with our Tab key, so have fun exploring what's here.

For now though, let's change one last thing about how NVDA sounds. Our voice is all set, but what about when we're typing? How much info do we wanna hear? Let's go find out what we can change. We'll start by getting back to our list of categories. To do that, we'll use our Tab key, but we'll add the Shift key to it to go backward. So let's hold down Shift, and now we'll tap our Tab key.

[David] Voice, combo box, Microsoft David collapsed, Alt + V.

[Ricky] Okay, so we'll keep going with Shift plus Tab until we're back at our categories list. We can just keep holding down our Shift key and tapping Tab. Once we get where we need to be we'll just let go of our Shift key, so here we go.

[David] Synthesizer grouping, Change, edit read only, multi-line, Windows OneCore voices. Categories list, Speech, 2 of 14.

[Ricky] Awesome, we made it. Now, our last options to change for today are under our Keyboard category. So let's press our down arrow until we get there.

[David] Braille; 3 of 14, Vision; 4 of 14, Keyboard; 5 of 14.

[Ricky] And here we are, just like with our speech settings we'll Tab through these options and see what we've got. So let's Tab a couple of times to find our last preferences for today.

[Ricky] Keyboard, property page, Keyboard layout combo box, desktop collapsed, ALT + K, Select NVDA Modifier Keys list, Speak typed characters, check box checked, ALT + C.

[Ricky] Okay, great, here's where we can tell NVDA whether or not to speak each key we type. This box is checked right now, so NVDA will speak each time we press a key on the keyboard. If we wanna change that we'll just press our space bar to uncheck the box.

[David] Space, not checked.

[Ricky] Yep, that did it. Now, we'll Tab one last time.

[David] Speak typed words, check box not checked, Alt + W.

[Ricky] So this is just like our characters check box when it's checked, NVDA is gonna speak each word we type. And if it's unchecked, we'll just type without hearing the words spoken. And also, just like our characters checkbox, we can press the space bar to check, or uncheck the box

[David] Space, checked.

[Ricky] Nice, we've made a lot of changes today so that NVDA is really comfortable to listen to. To go ahead and save our changes, we're gonna press Enter. If we press our Escape key instead, our menu will close, but none of our changes will stick around. All right, so we'll press Enter.

[David] Desktop list, OBS Studio 6 of 9.

[Ricky] And that's it, our menu is closed and NVDA is sounding pretty good. I'm Ricky Enger, and I'm glad you could spend a little time with me today customizing how NVDA sounds, see you next time.