the issues you're getting are...well...interesting. In order to diagnose them though, here are some questions:
1. What virtual machine program are you using? I've seen instances where orca would have issues speaking stuff because of virtualbox, or the debian installer just crashing after you select a language, again, some kind of virtualbox weirdness.
2. What desktop environment did your image have? Make sure to pick up linux mint mate, as the mate desktop is the most accessible for beginners. I think you picked up cineman or something, that's not accessible. KDE plasma is a bit more accessible though, but still, if you didn't get the ubuntu mate one, redownload and attempt the installation again.

Zorin OS is garbage from my initial test. I downloaded the Lite version because I despise! Gnome, but I can't do anything with it. I had to hit Alt+F2 then type Orca because the shortcut didn't work, and now it won't read anything when I tab around or use Orca review. I guess this is another junk distro. It looks like the best one is still Mint Mate.

Have fun using Gnome. As for me, I'll continue using Mint Mate, as it's given me the least trouble out of everything I've tried. Arch is not newbie friendly at all and even though I consider myself to be an intermediate to advanced computer user, it gives me a headache.

Citimen in VM ware. I tried Mait, but it caused my whole computer to crash after it gave a bunch of network errors and spat out a bunch of numbers. Someone said it was a VM ware problem, so I might try Virtual Box. For the chrome apps, I'll just leave them open untill I restart.

I too would be just trying to learn Linux in a VM, although I'd use Fusion on Windows because I'm already familiar with it, thus taking that part of the learning curve away. Mint Mate sounded like the perfect thing for me until I read that last post about Orca crashing when Chromium Apps are closed. That's a dead showstopper for me, so the question still remains...Are there any one of these hundreds of distros that is GUI-based and allow you to get speech relatively easily?

The whole mate freezing thing put me off as well, so I just moved to ratpoison and that was that. The only issue I have with it though, is that copying and pasting doesn't work anywhere, and googling hasn't got me a solution. As for Orca not reading stuff, I can highly recommend you take a look at flat review. It's Orca's take on NVDA's object navigation.

Copy/pasting where?

IIRC, it's a triple click in the terminal to start then move flat review, then end the selection and copy/paste?

We need StormDragon in here to anser that one for certain, I've got it to work but not really tried copy/pasting out of a terminal. I usually just pipe things to a text file and copy/paste from there

Orca was designed to work with Gnome? Hmmm, that's weird, because I find Gnome to be extremely unintuitive. Hearing window and then nothing else when I arrow isn't what I'd call intuitive. Opening settings dialogs and hearing panel or button isn't helpful either. I'll have to give Rat Poison a try, but it seems a little weird. Is it more for terminal use? I don't mind the terminal, but I'd still like to be able to quickly switch between running applications, access a list of all installed applications, and access status information such as Wi-Fi and volume.

@Camlorn, that was actually very helpful, and it sounds like from subsequent posts that if I want to mess with this at all, RatPoison and cloaning StormDragon's Repo would be the way to go, but I think I'll stay awaye and keep tabs on that Screen Reader @BGTLover is writing.

I got mint Mate to work. I just have 3 small problems and Googling didn't help. My first problem sounds like a joke, but I need to access the screen reader opos, and they should it was incert plus some other key. Only problem is that my computer doesn't have an insert key, and I don't want to buy an external keyboard just for the screen reader settings in a Linux VM. What do I do?
The second problem is Espeak. How do I install better sounding voices?
The third problem is small, and I can work around it, but I have a little bit of vition in my right eye and was wondering if I could change the desktop background. If so, how?

@14, it's a global issue. Nano/vim copy and paste isn't working, I can't copy stuff from firefox and paste it into terminal or even into leafpad or any other editor. I personally wouldn't recommend typing orca -s in a terminal, since that locks up your terminal and if you were to close it, boom goes your orca unless you press windows/super alt S, wait 5 seconds, and press it again to turn orca back on.

Ok so, gonna chime in here to say some stuff
first, about my screenreader, as I said times before, it won't be able to do much on its own, replacing orca isn't gonna solve anything long term, honestly, not that it would be particularly hard to do considering the state of orca nowadays.
The reason linux desktops aren't very accessible isn't necesarily orca, though its very low amount of features isn't contributing much to things becoming better. What's actually the guts of the problem is, in a way, precisely the diversity of which all of us linuxers are proud of. How is that possible, you ask? Well, you see, most people don't know anything about accessibility, a screenreader, etc. No, seriously, go ask a particularly tec savvy user, better if they have some background in UI design, and who is not employed about accessibility, most of the time you'll get something like screenreaders, huh?
So then, unless linux desktop designers are employed to do what they're doing, most of them won't even know what the hell atspi is, how orca works, etc. In that case, naturally they won't know a thing about accessibility and interfacing with the existing linux a11y stack. As we know, that eventually leads to a very slick and visually appealing desktop, but with no a11y integration, the point where we are now.
Why is mate and such stuff accessible? Well, the designers of gnome2 either only used gtk controlls which are fully compliant with atspi, or actually knew of atspi and made their controlls respond to the right dbus events and give the proper information when asked. Whichever way it is, they are the reason we can use linux in the first place, they and sun when that was a thing.
Gradually though, as newer desktops came to happen, people begun to forget more and more about accessibility, wayland didn't even have support integrated, actually some security measures in there are making things difficult, see touchscreen stuff.
Now, let's zoom back to microsoft, apple and their respective monopolies, since the lack of customisation we hate ironically benefits us the most on there. Because both ms and apple own the OS foundation, the a11y stack, the os ui and native controlls, we are guaranteed to have accessibility and nice integrations between the screenreader aka a11y API consumer, the desktop itself, the apps that come with the system or those made with native system controlls, the configuration and system settings layer, etc, so all in one solutions can be beneficial in some cases, only if you maybe probably squint at it sidewise. Another example of where this is true is android. Basically, stock android is as accessible as it can get, the more customisations a manufacturer makes, the more a11y issues could appear because stuff isn't designed properly. For example, ever used a huawei device? Well, the launcher isn't the most accessible there is, since one can't blindly organise apps in folders, arrange them in different places on the screen, etc. Things can definitely be worse though, I heard soni phones have some a11y issues on the lockscreen and the launcher both, so I consider my self lucky. Yes you can change the launcher and all that, you can go even further with root, but it's hard for someone new to this to even know what is a launcher and how to make it accessible. So yeah, this is the challenge of the millenium for us as a community, how can we nullify this tradeoff between walled in ecosystem and accessible vs open and free but a big depends on accessibility?
All that being said, you may ask, why can such a11y be possible if made by apple or ms, yet foss people struggle or don't care? Well, if the ada wouldn't exist, we won't have even that and maybe everything would be like linux, but for now, they're legally forced to provide this level of accessibility at least in the US, and since they aren't gonna pull a soni because no resources or something, all the world is gonna enjoy it.
So yeah, I will do my best with odilia screenreader, I'll add as many features as I can think up as long as I'm not limited by the current a11y api for now, I'll certainly add addons and will try to see what can be done about touchscreen, controller and other kinds of input maybe through some kernel trickery, but nothing I will do could magically solve the linux accessibility issues over night, unless I make a desktop environment to go with the screenreader, at which point I'm not better than microsoft, apple or all those people we foss people hate or grudgingly accept, depends who you ask.
To reiterate, a solid, wickid fast and feature packed linux screenreader is only the first step, to actually go further I hope that the sr would have enough innovations and improvements that other people, namely desktop developers, would be willing to consider accessibility and, if nothing else, accept pull requests related to that. Basically, I'm trying to rase atspi and a11y awareness among the right people by making a very powerful and impressive program that leverages the stack to provide a much better user experience, possibly including some desktop specific hacks or overlays as addons that make stuff more accessible, to show these people, hey it can be done, now it's your turn to work with us.
If you want to find more about the odilia screenreader, either google it because we are on there as well, or go to the homepage of the odilia website. Yeah, indeed we bought a domain for who's wondering where's the fancy name coming from, in anticipation of other things possibly happening on odilia.app subdomains.
@20, I'm glad linux mint mate works for you, hope you like it, it's the most accessible desktop to date. So now, to your issues
1. Go to a terminal, then type orca -s -r &
2. Depends what kind of voices you want, you can buy voxin if you want vocaliser, don't wory, it's affoardable. If you want cheeper/free stuff, try rhvoice or flite. For flite, sudo apt install flite speech-dispatcher-flite should do the work pretty nicely, it's up to you where you find better flite voices and where you put them.
3: I'm not even one bit sighted, so I dk if this does the right thing or not, but take this