Hello,

BIOS/UEFI does not support text-to-speech. It is technically possible for UEFI to support at least a basic text-to-speech system to read options as you navigate. HOwever, convincing manufacturers to implement this seems nearly impossible. Your best bet when it comes to this is to get a sighted person to help you in real time. That could be a person in the same room with you, or someone on a live video connection through a service like Be My Eyes or Aira. You might get some information using Taptap See or Seeing AI, but I don't find those to be as helpful because you can't tell where you are and what your cursor is set to.

Posts 2 and 3 are correct. I sent in a request strait to the UEFI forum, describing such an interface, but they told me they couldn't make it apart of the UEFI specification simply because it has to remain as vendor-generic as possible. But they were at least open to the idea. They said they'd see what they could do. It is not possible at all for a PC BIOS implementation to have a TTS interface at all. It is simply too abstract for that. The problem that you must understand about this problem is that:
* for the BIOS, your processor is still in real mode (16-bit mode), so only has access to the first 1MB of memory. Loading any other apps into that small of a memory space would be nearly impossible, if not completely so.
* The UEFI specification does require that all implementations run in 64-bit mode (also known as "long mode"); however, a TTS interface would require a sound interface. UEFI does not require an implementation to have such an interface. This would also require a runtime service to be implemented (no, not a boot service). There are some requirements for these services from section 8.1:

Alternatively, a sound interface could be implemented as a protocol, though I'm not sure how this could be done. Unfortunately, the UEFI specification does not define such a protocol in chapters 9-21 of the specification. Therefore, it is up to the vendor to implement the interface.

I think OpenSuSe tried that once in the boot loader... it... didn't exactly work very well. It was nearly impossible to understand, and it used very, very low-quality WAV files. We're talking like the fucking 8-bit WAV ones, static included. It would be nice to have something like this, but I wouldn't get your hopes up.

@7, you can't run anything through DOS mode on [any] modern computer without, well, DOS. Which, I don't think, is available any more, anywhere. You wouldn't like DOS mode anyway. No one would these days.

the bios doesn't use dos or anything else. it has it's own system so no you can't create things for it, 8 bit or not. I believe one company did put a speech option in to their bios about 20 years ago but it either caused problems or not enough people needed it. I think it was giggabite on their boards but I wouldn't swear to it.

Toshiba used to make a windows based bios editor as well although it was kind of limited. not sure if they still do. pretty sure asus, acer, Lenovo etc don't though. maybe del do but it'll take you 3 hours to get it to talk to you and then it'll not be able to speak your language.

asus once did this thing on their asus p5 A D 2 E premium mother board. ware you hured this chick saying, Computer now booting from operating system.
it was a wave file. and you could customise it in windows to play your own customised chime or what ever you wished, but that was about it, never sw any sort of speach in bios before.
a real pitty it could not be done though. but I have a question my self. remember thos sirial port sinths you used to get, the hardware ones? could they not some how be used to get speach access to bios?

At post 12, no, even with a serial synth, there's no way to access the BIOS because there's no way to have any screen reader loaded. The BIOS is its own internal operating system, nothing can be added to it.

Even that has many problems, not the least of which is that there's no way to know which item in a menu is selected.