As far as I know, TrueCrypt is completely accessible. Is there something you're having a problem with?

NTFS is the files system that windows uses. You can compare that to the table of contents of a book. NTFS is one table, and HFS is another table per say. Now that is out of the way, I would say that zip or seven zip might work, but it comes down to how bad you do not want any one to have access to the file or files. If you wan true encryption, you do want to be able to have someone of whom you trust to be able to verify that the program you are using works in this regard. That is why you might use a open source program like what Truecript was. As for just encrypting just a few files or the whole drive, that depend on how you wish to protect your data. If you cover the whole drive, you could possible claim that you don't have the password to the system, but you could run the risk of someone just wiping the drive. Then again, I could see someone doing full disk encryption on thumb drives just incase you misplaced it, and only encrypting the stuff you carried about on the computer. Anyway, no matter what you do for encryption, you do have some worry when it comes to your key being in ram. if you don't have the system powered up, your encryption key will not be in ram because of your ram require power to hold stuff. In short, I think that full disk encryption is good when you want to make sure that you got everything, and not uses full disk encryption when you know that there is a few things you wish to protect. HTH.

I don't really know, but I would think that it would be a very short time after you boot. Just remember, if you do decide on a full drive encryption, to shut your system completely down when it is not in use to get the full use out of the encryption. I think it could be a good idea seeing that you may not even want anyone to access the temp files. I know that when I unzip something, the zip program I use sometimes use the temp folder on my system for storage until the whole file is unzip. Just something that might should be taken in to account. I wonder if encryption programs would do the same if you are just doing a group of files instead of the whole drive.

If you're going to use full drive encryption, it would be impossible to have speech at the login screen. Question: is your drive an HDD? If so, you could probably enter the password, then listen for activity. If there doesn't appear to be anything going on, you could assume that you entered it incorrectly and try again. If your drive is an ssd, it shouldn't take long at all to get you from TrueCrypt's bootloader to the logon screen if you've entered the password correctly. I don't think it would present much of a challenge to get through that screen without speech or audio prompts. Also, I agree with @Turtlepower17. I use VeraCrypt every day to encrypt my USB drives and some folders in Dropbox.

TrueCrypt and VeraCrypt only require a password, so you wouldn't have to worry about entering a username. As for the behavior of what happens when you enter the wrong password, I'm not sure. I was going to try it out in a virtual machine but unfortunately I don't have any on this laptop. That might be a good way to try it out though if you can.

I would think an OCR app would be better than TapTapSee for reading computer screens. I have tried using TapTapSee to read displays on things like a thermostat and my sleep number bed's remote. Sometimes you get what the display says, sometimes you don't. Frustrating when each attempt cost money, not so bad now that it's free.

I am currently reading through the VeraCrypt user's guide, this sounds like a very nice program, but I have run across one item that may not be very blind user friendly in the volume creation steps.

I can hook up a mouse to my laptop or enable the touchpad to provide a mouse, but how am I supposed to know when the pointer is within the Creation Wizard window, and how am I supposed to know when the randomness indicator turns green? Consider that I am using JAWS so any NVDA specific techniques won't work.

For audio cues, I can write a short program to generate speaker beeps to see if my laptop has a speaker, then since VeraCrypt allows you to customize the log on screen text, imbed some control 'G's in the text to beep the speaker.

I could install VMWare Player and create a virtual machine with Windows 7, but would the virtual machine be accessible as is, or would I need to install a screen reader in the virtual machine too?

@livrobo

Oh! So the randomness indicator is just a color changing progress bar? JAWS will read that! The VeraCrypt manual gives the impression that it was just a graphic that turned green.

The closest thing JAWS has to NVDA's mouse simulator is their touch cursor which is just a way to navigate through all the objects on the screen regardless of whether they are controls for the user or if they are in the tab order sequence. But if the randomness indicator is just a progress bar, I could just keep moving the mouse around the screen until JAWS announces 100%. That will work. Thanks!

@Wanderer

Thanks! That answers the question. So virtual machines have to have their own screen reader, the screen reader on the host won't read the virtual machine's screen. If I was creating a virtual machine I'd be using for a while, I'd install JAWS, but for a quick try of VeraCrypt, Navigator will do.

There's no description of how the preboot log on screen behaves in the manual, but if it's like the program my last employer used to secure their laptops, a wrong log on attempt just takes you back to the log on screen. After Windows loads, if there were any unsuccessful log on attempts, you'll get a windows showing a log of the failed attempts.

At Figment, I've actually had quite a bit of success using TapTapSee to read computer screens. i was trying to figure out why a laptop wouldn't boot, and I was able to get it to tell me when Windows was loading files when I was booting into a talking PE, as well as getting it to tell me why it originally wouldn't start to begin with. Apparently the OS had gotten corrupted somehow, because it asked for the insertion of a recovery disk. I'm glad you don't need to pay to use it anymore, because it's been a really useful app in a few other circumstances as well.

At figment, just a little thing i noticed once. If you use jaws OCR feature on the window where you have a virtual machine open, you don't have to have a screen reader running on the virtual machine. While the text might be a little scrambled, it's nice to get through login screens, on linux distress for example. You might try it to monitor the behavior of the failed password screen for your program of choice. Hope this makes sense, just woke up lol.