Voice assist driving me crazy!

[cbraxton]

This is for Ubuntu Mate 18.04.3...

All of a sudden I am getting voice assist for everything on the screen; menus, programs, files, etc. Also for keyboard input. I did not knowingly do anything to turn this on. Makes it virtually impossible to watch videos etc. or do anything involving audio. I have to keep the volume muted or it just drives me nuts.

I looked in System/Preferences/Personal/Assistive Technologies, and did not see anything applicable - and the assistive tech is not enabled (check box is clear). How can I turn this off?

[cbraxton]

Well I guess not many people have run into this problem. For what it's worth I came up with a workaround - in the "Applications" tab of Sound Preferences, mute eSpeak and speech-dispatcher. This silences the annoying voice assist while permitting audio in other applications to function normally. It would be better to find a way to disable voice assist entirely but this will do for now.

[VeloxNeb]

Super+Alt+S toggles Orca.