It sounds like you may not have Track Pad commander turned on. The first thing to try then is to ensure that you have Track pad commander turned on. To do this you need to hold the vo keys down and make a rota gesture on the track pad. That is move your finger and thumb as if you were turning a dial in a clockwise direction whilst holding control and option.
Now try doing a three finger double tap again. Hopefully this will restore speech. You may have to try and do this a few times until you get the double tap rhythm right. As soon you have regained speech I recommend you go straight to Voiceover Utility and then interact with the Utility table and then go down to commanders. Uninteract with the table and navigate to the keyboard commander tab. Here you can set up a shortcut key to toggle Voiceover speech on and off. You select a key, in my case I used A and then hit the command button. You then have to cursor through the categories of commands to find the command to toggle Voiceover speech on and off. It is important that you be clear about what you are trying to achieve and what you are not trying to achieve here as there are similar sounding options. 1. You are not trying to mute and unmute sound on the computer. This is often confused with muting speech. I noticed some incorrect advice about using function keys for this earlier in the thread which will not help you in this situation. 2. You are not trying to turn Voiceover on or off. 3. You are however trying to mute and unmute speech. You want to look for the mute and unmute speech toggle, definitely not mute and unmute sound. I can go and look for this myself in the command list tomorrow if you cannot find it but you should be able to find it if you work through the categories systematically. Setting this key up does make life a lot easier for those occasions when the pesky track pad causes these types of problems. If this ever happens to me now I just press right option A on my keyboard and Voiceover speech comes straight back. David Griffith -----Original Message----- From: mac-access-boun...@mac-access.net [mailto:mac-access-boun...@mac-access.net] On Behalf Of melissa tucker Sent: 13 March 2014 02:42 To: & iOS Accessibility OS X Subject: still having problems turning on speech on the mac Even with earlier suggestions, I still can't get speech to turn on. When using command f5, I get the voice over prompt, the immediately after that, it says speech off. I think I've messed up the functions on my track pad, because when doing the three finger double tap, the mac just makes a noise and no speech. Any other suggestions on how I can get my mac back up and running again, at least where I can hear it? thanks. <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to mac-access@mac-access.net You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/maillist.xml> As the Mac Access Dot Net administrators, we do our very best to ensure that the Mac-Access E-Mal list remains malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free. However, this should in no way replace your own security strategy. We assume neither liability nor responsibility should something unpredictable happen. Please remember to update your membership preferences periodically by visiting the list website at: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/mac-access/options/> <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to mac-access@mac-access.net You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/maillist.xml> As the Mac Access Dot Net administrators, we do our very best to ensure that the Mac-Access E-Mal list remains malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free. However, this should in no way replace your own security strategy. We assume neither liability nor responsibility should something unpredictable happen. Please remember to update your membership preferences periodically by visiting the list website at: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/mac-access/options/>
