I’m currently not able to experiment with this as I’m using the latest 2022.1 beta and the Code Factory drivers have not yet been updated to be compatible with that release. That being said I do recall the colon being read when you press insert-f12 to speak the time. You could either set the punctuation setting to none or you could go into the NVDA menu, choose Preferences and then Punctuation/Symbol Level and fine tune at what level of punctuation symbols like the colon are sent to the synthesizer.

thanks. so is their a way to have it not say dot every time I read something? I don't remember NVDA doing this before. Its also a fresh install. I had to reset my computer to factory settings and had to re-download everything.