i’m screaming help! I have lost all the speech on my computer.

I realize this is a difficult thing to determine without sighted assistance, but I am thinking you may have at one point, pressed the FN key + one of your Function keys and inadvertently pressed a mute toggle on your keyboard.
This will be difficult on your own, but my advice would be (while on your desktop) use something like the Be My Eyes app on your phone. call a volunteer and ask them to look at your screen while you activate Narrator with CTRL + Windows key + Enter.

If it activates, but you hear nothing, press and hold the FN key on your keyboard, and go through the Function keys, starting with F1 through F12. Chances are you will unmute your computer this way.

This will be a time consuming process, and you will absolutely be frustrated. Just hang in there and I think things will worl out for you.

Alternatively if you have a sighted friend, family member, or neighbor (that you trust), invite them over for coffee and some troubleshooting. 🙂

Best of luck to you.

I second Brian's incling that the volume is likely muted or all the way down.
As far as troubleshooting, I believe you can reach the Microsoft Disability Answer Desk through The Be My Eyes app--don't quote me on this though. If so, IMHO this would be the way to go. Also if you have a USB headset or an external sound card, try plugging that in and see if sounds play through that.

I realize what I am about to share will not help you with this current situation, but it may help prevent the situation from ever happening in the future. There is a nice little NVDA add-on called unmute audio. Basically, when NVDA starts, it will check your speakers to see if they are muted, and force them to be unmuted. It is a handy little thing, and I highly suggest you install that as soon as you get this situation resolved. Link below.

https://github.com/grisov/unmute

As far as memory can serve, I have been through this. Windows Update modified my sound driver and I had no audio at all. If you have a braille display connect it to see if you can diagnose the issue yourself. Also try wired headset to see if audio can come through. Other than this you may need sighted assistance.

Hello Honest nan. Let's see if any of these ideas might help.

First, if you're using built-in speakers/headphones, try using a USB speaker or headphones instead. Do the reverse if you're using USB sound as your speech.

2nd, the program sndvol may be your friend. Once logged in, press windows key+r, then type sndvol in the box that comes up & press enter. At this point you're on your primary volume control. Up arrow turns the volume up, down arrow does the opposite. Usually. There do seem to be some rare machines in which the order is reversed. Try up arrow first, or even page up for increments of 20.

Make sure your keyboard--or headset, if using one--doesn't have a mute command. Turning the volume up w/sndvol should resolve it, but it's nonetheless worth checking. As always, make sure speaker/headphone connections are tight & intact. I remember a long time ago having to travel 50mi 1 way to get a client's speech back, when she could've crawled under the table and realized that her doubletalk had come unplugged.

If these solutions don't work for your screenreader of choice, please try using narrator as well. Situations like yours are why it's really imperative that screen reader users have both use of built-in sound as well as a USB headset.

Please let us know how this goes.

Honest nan, you said:
"I hear a click every time I turn the computer off or on. So I am pretty sure the speakers are working."

That tends to occur either before, in the case of on, or after, in the case of off, Windows is actually operational. So Windows could be, and very possibly is, muting your sound.

Just for the halibut, I muted my computer using my keyboard. When I typed sndvol into the run box, pressed enter, & then pressed page-up, it unmuted the machine. YMMV, of course.

@AbleTec - Your suggestion of sndvol is fantastic! I cannot believe this is not more widely known.

@HonestNan - If you try AbleTec's instructions above, if you press Tab one time after opening up the Sound Mixer, your focus should land on the Mute/Unmute button. Press Space Bar to toggle that.

Have you tried that to close the web app?

https://github.com/jakubl7545/winWizard

WINWIZARD is a pretty awesome add-on. It gives windows a lot of really cool functionality, even a couple things that macOS has. Such as hiding foreground and background windows. The reason I suggest it, however, is because it comes with a very nice alternative to Alt F4. If you press the Windows key + F4, it will close apps, etc. Even if they are persistent and are refusing to close with Alt F4.

Add this to your copy of NVDA and you are good to go.

If the above link doesn't work, you can find it in the NVDA add-on store.

HTH. 😎

I've encountered the alt+f4 malfunction before, I think in Firefox. No idea what's going on. Maybe the menus get hidden the key gets captured by another function, or it's just an application bug. Close from the file menu still works on the rare occasions I run into it. Or alt+space to close from the system context menu (assuming you don't have that key turned on in the Copilot settings). In fairness, I've had it happen on Mac, too.
On muting, great to know the sndvol tip. Most under-the-hood Windows features can actually be run this way. I use the Unmute NVDA addon Brian mentioned, which activates when NVDA is restarted, and I also have NVDA set to always use the internal speakers, since a lot of times when it goes irretrievably silent on me, it's because something else got plugged in and Windows switched to it. There's another addon called Audio Manager that has a mute/unmute key combo. Your computer might have a mute key as well. I do all the above, because this situation has many times been the bane of my existence.
There are also times when the synthesizer goes dead for some reason. I've had this with SAPI and Narrator's neural voices. Yet another NVDA addon I use is Switch Synth, which I use to toggle between OneCore and SAPI Eloquence.
Then, there's crashing audio drivers during a firmware update. That's happened to me once or twice, too. It's almost enough to make me decide to go sighted.

I have been using WINWIZARD for over a year now, and I absolutely love it. I use it all the time. The Hide window feature is very handy. And as I said before, it's very similar to the hide window feature in macOS.
Of course, the windows plus F4 hotkey is also very nice. I hardly ever touch Alt F4 anymore these days.

Anyways, I'm glad the add-on is working out for you. Add-ons make the NVDA world go around. 😉

First, I'm glad the speech is back. I was going to suggest the sndvol idea, as I live by this command sometimes.

As for the ALT F4 not working, my guess is the keys are set for other functions like brightness, volume, etc. Many laptops allow you to switch the function keys behavior, but every model is a little different. Thankfully, I've seen more and more laptops honor the keyboard command FN + ESC. This will toggle the function keys at the top of the keyboard from actual function keys to media controls, and vice versa. I just got an updated laptop through work last week, and it had this problem. Good old FN + ESC seemed to work perfectly. A few computers have been mean though, and I haven't found a way to do it easily, other than changing this behavior in the bios, which will require sighted assistance.

Glad you got it fixed. This is one of the problem with Windows computers.

This thread has a link to an awesome tip for adjusting certain BIOS settings through PowerShell. Check it out.

https://applevis.com/forum/windows/using-powershell-configure-bios-windows

Here is an NVDA addon that can prevent what you just went through, honest nan, & maybe save others from going through it as well. I have no affiliation w/the developer.
https://nvda-addons.org/addon.php?id=112

Hi,

This is what I proposed in my comment above, titled, "For Future Reference". 😇

Hi guys, so I am having a similar issue. Every time my computer wakes up from sleep after it has been asleep for a long time, like overnight, it seems like I have lost the volume. However, when I use the control+alt+NVDA shortcut to toggle NVDA, the sound comes back. I can't figure out what would cause that to bring it back. Doing the command to start Narrator doesn't work, so it's weird that toggling NVDA does.
does anyone have any idea what might be causeing this and how I can fix it?

Hi,

Are you using the Unmute add-on for NVDA? If so, that would explain why NVDA starting fixes the sound, while Narrator does not. Also, when you say control plus Alt plus NVDA, do you mean control plus Alt plus 'N'?
If you are not using that add-on, then how comfortable are you accessing the Device Manager? I asked because there is a possibility that there is a power management setting that might be disabling your sound card when the computer goes into sleep mode, and not quite waking it up right away when the computer wakes up. My network card does this, and I had to uncheck a little box in order to get that behavior to stop.

HTH.