can I have speech before start up?

windows control enter is how you turn it on, it might work.

My school uses BitLocker, and even though I have some vision, it's not a lot of vision that I have. For a totally blind person, they are completely stuck when turning on the computer.

There is no way to have speech or a screen reader at the BitLocker prompt. What I do is use the Seeing AI app on my phone to scan the screen and it reads the text. Most likely its asking for your recovery key, since it asks for that if you get your password wrong.

I'm used to trash mac voiceover a lot here, but for this we must give apple real credits for what they've achieved >=m1 series.
Voiceover is literally present end to end from even before the boot of the system, to the safe mode, recovery menu / boot picker, etc. And it even announces progress during complete system upgrades. Dual booting for a blind person is very easy with mac hardware, I just wish that asahi was not the only other option but this :) is a whole other debate.
I don't know was bitlocker never enabled for me properly then? Cause I had it enabled and as far as I know my laptop has always booted into windows without any prompt before.
Though is this related to this thing that each time I reinstalled windows from scratch there is a thing where I have to blindly enter my password? Is that it?

Microslop for sure. Hope you can resolve this quickly.

Having no screen reader/even very basic narrator when at BitLocker screen is like tryna read braille with your chin. It's just not reasonable to have this kind of oversight in 2026.

If your computer has a TPM, BitLocker can be enabled and not prompt for a password. It will just verify that the files used to boot the system have not been tampered with by verifying their hashes with the TPM, and the TPM provides the decryption key to unlock the disk. This is supposed to make sure that no one can get into the system any other way than booting normally and authenticating at Windows login, and prevent someone from putting a keylogger into the kernel or boot manager and things like that, and it prevents people from taking your hard drive out and reading your files from it, or booting Linux from a USB drive and doing the same thing. When I enable BitLocker, I always enable the password prompt just to be safe though. You can change these settings in Group Policy, but you have to disable and enable BitLocker for the changes to take effect.

Microsoft would probably say that its not possible to have audio before the operating system has booted, but the OpenCore boot manager, used for booting MacOS on X86 computers not from Apple, has a UEFI audio driver built-in and the boot manager talks. OpenCore speaks the names of the boot entries and other prompts as well, and if FileVault is enabled on MacOS, the MacOS boot loader speaks using this audio driver and announces the username and password prompts. This doesn't speak the BitLocker prompt unfortunately because Microsoft would have to add support for this audio driver, but this proves that Microsoft could make BitLocker accessible if they wanted to whatever excuse they use.

The world's PC firmware engineers just all decided that people not using monitors weren't legitimate actors. No BIOS, and no early password-based decryption. Apparently, they haven't heard of network servers?

Anyway, TPM is fine until a security vulnerability means you can decrypt the disk and then avoid all the security checks from WinRE. Such as just happened recently …
https://www.hexnode.com/blogs/yellowkey-bitlocker-bypass-and-the-risks-in-winre-recovery-paths/

Certainly we should applaud Apple for solving this problem. But also, I think we have to be honest and say that this is only really an option for Apple because their recovery image is essentially part of the computer's firmware. It is a very clever solution, but it can't work in a world where the computer's firmware is stored on a chip rather than a disk partition, as indeed it was in the past with pre-Silicon Macs. I think what we really want is a fail-safe means to get into an accessible environment from which applications may usefully provide pre-boot services, but that's accessible. Perhaps it should be standardised, or maybe the OS can provide its own and the firmware just provides special-case handling for the relevant EFI binaries. I don't know. But I doubt it's going to be done, or done well, unless blind people are in the room.

I love that chin part! LOL!

I mean, I can’t say that I’m surprised, but this is still pretty bad. Like it’s 2026 for God sake, you would think that Microsoft would’ve made the bit locker accessible. Then again, and I’m just taking a rough guess here, could this be manufacturer based? An example, manufacturer a implements bit locker a certain way, manufacturer b implements it another certain way? i’m not saying this is an excuse, but that could be part of it maybe, but again, it’s no excuse for not implementing accessibility, same as with the bios, especially when you’re talking that these two things are essential for a user to be able to use their computer. granted they might not be used all the time every day, but given that these are essential component of the operating system? They should be made accessible Either way, it’s frankly ridiculous that it’s 2026, and things like the bios, bit locker, etc are not natively accessible, we can definitely see the, commitment, and yes, I’m being sarcastic; that Microsoft puts into accessibility! Great job! seriously, if I was a blind employee of Microsoft? I would be not just embarrassed, but bluntly speaking, disgusted. to be honest, the fact that other manufacturers, such as Apple, have made things like the bios, boot picker, in apple's case but same thing; file vault, etc fully natively accessible, but Microsoft still hasn’t? Embarrassing, especially for a trillion dollar company.
To the original poster, I’m really sorry you’re going through this, it might be worth mentioning this to the IT department to see if in your case bit locker can be disabled, or another solution, such as maybe a jaws script to make controls fields etc accessible, can be found, because you shouldn’t have to be bending over backwards just because bit locker isn't accessible because Microsoft doesn’t give a damn about accessibility. Best of luck.

I have read in the wild very interesting old post about some discussion considered about blind accessibility but tldr there is no central organization or insentive for manufacturers to take this seriously enough. And I think these posts / forums were quite old, 2014 2018 ish. Microsoft had the perfect timing / insentive with EUFI, they didn't care then and seeing how everything from them is going downheal currently... So... Good luck everyone! 😂👎

I've used probably half dozen corporate laptops till now, and all of them were bitlocker enabled by default, it's part of group policy through Microsoft Intune.
Never in my life did the laptop asked for bitlocker key, and if it ever asked, we wouldn't know what to enter, so that would be a big painful day for iT and for all of us in office.
I am guessing is that TPM chip is the reason, as described by someone above.
Any ways, Bios accessibility is something really being discussed at high levels, but I believe it's just in the discussions phase, nothing solid outcome as of now. I didn't know about Opencore boot manager, gonna dig deeper in to it.
Yeah, it's nice that Mac's Bios is accessible, but, I still wish if it could dual boot Windows, even the Arm version would be enough. Apple will surely get more customers if this capability were to be unlocked for it's M Series Macs.

Glad that you managed to get the issue sorted. I’ve only just seen this post but this is exactly what I had on my HP laptop with Windows as well and in the end my workplace managed to get a bit locker removed as it was so annoying. It’s a 48 digit number which you have to input and you lose the Will to live. I did it with Be My Eyes Microsoft Windows support for awhile but it just got tedious. However, I do use my Mac on a day-to-day basis and I prefer that to Windows but I just have to use it for work purposes.

If the prompt appears in Windows RE, it should be possible to use Narrator. Then again, I don't know much about BitLocker, and when I briefly had it enabled on my machine, I never got the prompt because the TPM authenticated and the computer booted normally.
I agree, Microsoft could be doing more to make their enterprise and power user features more accessible for us. Where's fully accessible Quick Assist, sound card emulation in Hyper-V, etc? Instead, Microsoft is prioritizing Copilot and other junk I couldn't care less about.