I’ve been given a large Word document to work on, and I decided to handle the bulk of it on my Windows laptop instead of my main MacBook Air. While doing this, I noticed a significant performance difference between screen readers: NVDA is extremely slow in Microsoft Word, whereas JAWS runs smoothly. With JAWS, I can navigate the document effortlessly, but with NVDA it lags heavily and sometimes becomes completely unresponsive.
Does anyone have suggestions for improving NVDA’s performance on Windows, particularly when working with large Word documents?
By Maldalain, 16 April, 2026
Forum
Windows
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Some questions
1. What version of NVDA are you using? Also is it the installed or portable version?
2. What speech synthesizer do you use with NVDA?
3. What add-ons (if any) are you running with NVDA?
4. What version of Word, Also is it Cloud or onboard?
5. What applications are running in your system tray? You will be surprised at how many background apps can lag out your PC these days.
@Brian
1 I’m using the latest version, installed (not the portable version).
2 I’m using IBM Eloquence, and I don’t notice any difference when switching to other voices such as Vocalizer or Acapela.
3 Regarding add-ons, I only have basic ones installed: Weather+, Zoom Enhancements, Vocalizer, and about four or five others. None of them interact with or modify documents in any way.
4 I’m using the on-board version of Microsoft Word. I’m not entirely sure of the exact version, but it’s likely 2021, as I received the license through my university in that year.
5 There are almost no background applications running—just iCloud in the system tray. Other cloud apps like Dropbox and Google Drive are disabled. I’ve also disabled most startup programs. My RAM usage sits at around 25% even with Word open.
For reference, my system has 32GB of RAM and an Intel Ultra 7 258V processor.
As an example of the issue: when navigating through headings in a document, JAWS moves instantly between headings, whereas NVDA exhibits significant lag.
It’s not a dealbreaker—I can continue using JAWS—but I’m mainly curious whether there’s a way to improve NVDA’s performance with Word documents.
Probably your Word version
I use NVDA in book-length documents every day for hours a day without the kind of lag you're talking about. I will say, JAWS is slightly more responsive and reliable than NVDA in Microsoft 365, particularly in comments--that's the only plus JAWS has over NVDA in my book. But it's more about one little bug plus a very, very slight delay. Word has changed a great deal since 2021, so that might be it. One thing you could play with under NVA's advanced settings is whether to use UIA in Microsoft Word Controls (which includes documents). That setting dictates whether to rely on Microsoft's very sluggish accessibility tree or use old-school methods of getting the document text. UIA and NVDA's communication with it have improved markedly since 2021, so it might not work so well in your version.
You could try switching to the Windows OneCore voices, which should be quite a bit more responsive than Acapella or Vocalizer, although the Code Factory version of Eloquence I use is more responsive than One Core.
Also try different documents to make sure that isn't it.