Debian: speech goes silent in VMware

[Øyvind Lode]

Hi all:

I've been trying to install debian 9.x in a VM (vmware) on Windows.
I use this approach for testing purposes and I also wanted to have a
couple of vms running debian stretch.
I have used the same iso files (written to usb flash disk) and used
the flash to boot up and install stretch on physical hardware without
a hitch.

However, on vmware speech suddenly goes silent.
It happens during install.
Last time I tried it stopped when I was about to select keyboard layout.
I've tried it on vmware on 3 different machines (host OS) both windows
7 and windows 10 with the same result.
I've also tried using usb headset and I always get speech after
pressing 's' at the boot menu but speech stops after a while during
setup regardless of host machine and/or soundcard.

I wanted to try VirtualBox 5.2 when I read that the 5.2 beta includes
accessibility improvements but the UI was not yet usable.
I could setup the vm but booting up the vm and select boot media UI
was inaccessible.

I don't know of other virtualization software on windows that is
accessible for me to try.

Is this a vmware issue or the debian installer with speech.
I'm pretty sure it would work just fine without speech and
accessibility activated.