January 20, 2017 12:23 pm

Welcome to the first edition of “In-Process”, The new NV Access blog, where we’ll keep you informed of happenings within the organisation, our staff and of course, NVDA.

Over the past year, our 10th anniversary celebrations have highlighted what a fantastic community NV Access has. We love seeing how important NVDA is to the blindness community around the world. We want to ensure communication is a two-way street. Our new year’s resolution for 2017, is to keep you better informed. We intend to use this blog to keep you abreast of milestones, updates and projects.

If you are on the NVDA users e-mail list, you may have met me; I’m Quentin Christensen, NV Access’ tame resident training developer. The NVDA users e-mail discussion list is a great place for tips, advice and peer support. If you would like to join the NVDA users discussion list, please see the NVDA Users e-mail list.

If you’d like to contact us directly, NV Access now also has a new e-mail address for general queries. The new address is: info@nvaccess.org.

The Basic Training for NVDA module has been extremely well received. We are pleased to share that the Daisy MP3 audio version will be available for download very shortly (I am listening to the recording as I write this). Following the “Basic Training for NVDA” module, “Microsoft Word with NVDA” is also available. The certification for these is in the pipeline. Further information will be available shortly. The modules are available from our shop.

Thank you to everyone who participated in our branding survey last year. We have been working through all the great information you shared in the survey. We’ll have some exciting developments coming from this over the next few months.

Also coming in the first quarter is NVDA 2017.1. One of the biggest developments in this release will be support for the Amazon Kindle PC app. A beta version of NVDA with Kindle support is currently available from the NVDA Kindle beta page.

Back to NVDA 2017.1 and there are a lot more exciting features coming. Some highlights include:

Kindle 1.19 support.

Lithuanian is now a supported language.

Microsoft Word: Section numbers are now reported. Imported tables are identified. Several freezes have also been fixed.

WordPad: Language switching now supported.

Microsoft Edge: Find in browse mode is available. Quick navigation to buttons (b and shift+b) is also now supported.

Microsoft Excel: Unavailable menu items are now identified. Attempting to type text in protected view now produces an error sound. There is also better detection of overflowing or cropped text in cells.

ARIA read-only checkboxes now detected.

These are currently in NVDA Master (beta quality) builds if you are keen to try them out straight away.

A note for those using Insider builds in Windows 10. We are aware that from build 15002, Microsoft Edge is currently not accessible. We have raised this with Microsoft as a matter of urgency.

Speaking of beta programs, speech recognition users might be interested in Dictation Bridge. Dictation Bridge works with either Dragon NaturallySpeaking or Microsoft speech recognition. Note this is not an NV Access project. It is a third party project, developed with crowdfunding support and sponsorship from the Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired of San Francisco. See the Dictation Bridge website.

Some big events are coming up this year. CSUN is the premiere assistive technology conference. It is held at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, California. NV Access are thrilled to announce that Mick, Jamie, Reef and Quentin will be presenting at CSUN. The session: “NVDA, the free screen reader: 2017 and beyond” is on Wednesday 1st March at 1:20 in Hillcrest AB.

Once again, the supporters of NV Access and users of NVDA are coming together for NVDACon 2017. NVDACon an international community-driven and user-run conference. We would like to thank Derek Riemer, the chair of the organising committee, and the entire committee for their tireless efforts and dedication. Their work will no doubt make this year’s NVDACon even bigger than ever. More information on NVDACon can be found on its new, official website at: https://www.nvdacon.org/.

What else are we working on? How about contracted Braille input as well as improved ARIA 1.1 support? Jamie is also working on a server upgrade, bringing HTTPS support everywhere (key areas such as the shop already use HTTPS). The server upgrade also moves the site to http2, which should make everything faster.

Phew, that was a lot to get through in one post! Our intention is to post these updates regularly from now. They won’t all be this long but will keep everyone in touch with what we are up to from week to week. If you have questions, comments or feedback on these posts, do, please get in touch with us. We’d love to hear from you at our new info address: info@nvaccess.org.

Finally, be sure to bookmark the main In-Process page to stay up to date.