muting speech without the track pad

I don’t know off the top of my head, but if you hold down VO and press H twice you go to the commands help menu. You can then type something to filter the results. The commands tend to tell you the keyboard shortcut there. So if you do VO+H, H then type screen curtain you might get the answer there.

The other thing you can do is to use something like Keyboard Commander or NumPad commander and setup shortcuts yourself. For example, I have right option + 3 to toggle screen curtain.

Sorry not at my Mac at the oment so can’t check. Someone else might be able to be more helpful.

What you can do is set up keyboard commander. I have it set up on my MacBook Air 2020, and the key I use to mewt speech is option plus Z. Very useful feature,

From what I know, open voice over utility go to the utility categories and go to the near bottom until it says commanders. Go out of the categories list and control option right arrow until you get to keyboard commander, and then you can set it up from there.

The keyboard command for Screen Curtain is VO-Shift-F11. While there is no default command mapped to the "Mute speech toggle," you should be able to assign your own command to it in VoiceOver Utility > Commands. For more information on how to assign custom commands to VoiceOver functions, check out the AppleVis Podcast episode "A Demonstration and Walkthrough of VoiceOver Command Customization on macOS."

HTH

Distinct VoiceOver commanders have been removed in macOS Sequoia, but if you're using a prior version of macOS, Keyboard Commander should work to assign a command to the "Mute speech" toggle.

Imo I don’t like the redesign of the commanders in macOS 15.

I personally go with the same, if it ain’t broken don’t fix it. Know the commanders and macOS 14 were broken, there was no reason to fix them because they’re running fine.

But oh well. It’s Apple, what the hell can we do about it?

You should be able to add your own commander for this. For years I used to use Option + Shift + V to mute speech. Truth be told i had a bunch of commanders for various tasks, including one to reboot VO itself. Was handy during the days of the dreaded SNR.

Of course these days I don't use my Mac anymore, but good to know some things have not changed too much. 🙂

Corrections.
When upgrading on both partition (beta and stable) from sonoma to sequoia, all commander commands were still running. It's just a naming convention now it's called option key although everyone will understand that it's in fact commander. You don't have to assign or modify VO keys if you don't want, as simple as that. For me personally coming from windows we should have had for years, and it's a refreshing ergonomic keyboard improvement where voiceover has always been lacking.

I agree we should have had fully customizable commands a long time ago, but better late than never. This means you can assign any command to the VoiceOver modifier to toggle speech. As for the trackpad, there's also another setting in the trackpad section that allows you to completely disable it which you may find useful. I don't have a modern MacBook, but from what a friend showed me, you need to have the trackpad commander enabled for this to work.

I've got to say I always quite like having the commanders as a separate thing. I think I appreciate having a standard set of VO commands that will just work whichever Mac I am sat in front of, and then I can just go to town and make the keyboard commander or numpad commander do what I want. I feel like I don't mind experimenting with them knowing that the basic commands are still there. Whereas I feel a lot more tentative looking at the NVDA keyboard customizations.

There is something nice about asking how to do something and the answer will always work, and then I have options if I want to make a more personal shortcut.

But maybe that's just me and partly because that's what I got used to. I'm sure I will get used to the Sequoia way if I am ever brave enough to go there.