February 23, 2018 5:45 pm

Hi everyone,

Hasn’t February been a busy month so far? So busy, in fact, that I’m a week behind in posting In-Process!

What has kept us busy? One reason is that last weekend, the staff and board of NV Access all got together in Brisbane to catch up on what has been happening over the past year, and plan where we are going.

Statistics

In considering where we are and where we are heading, here are some interesting statistics about NVDA:

Our Top 10 download countries: India, United States, Brazil, Russian Federation, France, United Kindom, Germany, Poland, Canada, Argentina.

We are still seeing a major spike in India, and it’s also great to see Canada in the top 10 as well!

2017.3 was downloaded over 162,000 times with 66% due to updates, thus about 107,000 active users.

The update server is detecting around 34,000 users per day running NVDA connected to the internet. This doesn’t account for companies and individuals who have disabled update checking, or those without access to the Internet.

There have been a number of changes to the screen reader market recently, which has seen an increase in demand for NVDA. Our users have once again risen to the challenge, producing the “Switching from Window-Eyes to NVDA” guide, to sit next to the already popular “Switching from Jaws to NVDA” guide.

In the recent WebAIM screen reader user survey, NVDA more than doubled its percentage of users who use it as their primary screen reader, compared to the previous year’s survey, moving to a clear second position.

When looking at which screen reader users commonly use, nearly 2/3 of respondents commonly use NVDA.

There are an estimated 39 million blind people around the world and an estimated 285 million blind and vision impaired people, yet anecdotally only 400,000 screen reader users. That means there is a large number of people yet to be reached. NVDA is no longer just about creating something so that more people can get access to computers. That is still important, however, current and future users are also relying on NVDA to continue to exist until it is not needed. NVDA is filling a bigger gap than ever before.

NV Access Video

NV Access has a new video. It is designed not only to showcase NVDA, but also the crucial need around the world that a free and open source screenreader fills. View the video on our YouTube channel

NVDACon – call for submissions

Preparations are underway for this year’s NVDACon. The NVDACon International planning committee would like to invite you to submit topics for the upcoming conference. NVDACon will be held in May or June of 2018. The date and agenda will be released at a future time. If you are a business, organization or individual that is passionate about a topic related to accessibility, please submit your topic by March 17th, 2018. If you have any questions or would like to submit a topic, please contact info@nvdacon.org. For more information, please see the NVDACon website

NVDA 2018.1rc1

Finally, because you know I like to keep you in suspense, the first release of NVDA for 2018 is now very close! So close, in fact, that you can download the Release Candidate build right this very minute! The release candidate is a version we release just before a new version. All going well, the final, stable version will be identical to the release candidate. The idea is that more people will try the release candidate than our usual snapshot (beta) builds. If any big problems are found, we can then quickly release a second release candidate with a fix before the final version a week or so later. So without further ado, here is the NVDA 2018.1rc1 (release candidate) announcement

That’s all for today. Have a great weekend, and I look forward to giving a full recap of what is new in NVDA 2018.1 next time around.