Welcome to the Home of NVDA
NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) is a free and open source screen reader for the Microsoft Windows operating system. This software can enable blind or vision impaired people to access computers running Windows for no more cost than a sighted person.
NVDA allows the user to find out what is happening on the screen by querying the Operating system and using a speech synthesizer to output the information.
For more information about the project, visit the About section.
Check out the Download section if you would like to obtain a copy.
For information about email lists, the NVDA IRC chat channel and links to community sites written in other languages, take a look at the Community section.
For documentation about NVDA, visit the Documentation section.
For information on how to report bugs, feature requests, etc., please see ReportingIssues.
If you wish to contribute to the project, please consider making a Donation to NV Access.
NVDA is still very much in development. It may contain bugs and not be as stable as other commercial screen readers. However, even though it may not work correctly in every situation, people are reporting that NVDA works well for basic computing tasks, and definitly has the potential to grow in to something as usable as the commercial screen readers.
Contacting the Developers
To contact the developers of NVDA, please send us an email at: developers@nvda-project.org. However, we do ask that before asking questions, you do take a look around the website (wiki, email list archives etc) to see if your question has already been answered.
News
Last Week in NVDA
I forgot to mention in the last update that Mick changed the way NVDA loads and unloads appModules. NVDA now associates appModules with process IDs, rather than window handles. This makes more sense, as an application is generally a single process. This change means that NVDA no longer needs to search for the main window of an application. Also, it is much more accurate in loading and unloading appModules at the appropriate times. For example, the NVDA appModule i ...
Last Week in NVDA
Last week, I continued work on implementing braille display support. Early in the week, I introduced code to move the caret to the next or previous line when scrolling the display if it cannot be scrolled any further. I fixed a bug that Mick found in liblouis. Mick and I discussed how to handle the review cursor with regard to braille, although no code has been implemented yet. We spent some time investiga ...
Last Week in NVDA
First of all, NVDA 0.6p2 is now almost at 6000 downloads (5973 at time of writing)! I'm amazed that it's continuing to increase by almost 1000 downloads a week.
I neglected to mention in my last update that Peter Vágner, primarily known for his fantastic work as our internationalisation coordinator (but also involved in other development), [changeset:2377 implemented initial code to move the mouse to the character under the review cursor in certain editable tex ...
This Week in NVDA
During the arduous task of exasperatedly scouring logs, searching tickets and racking my brains in order to construct my previous, infrequent progress reports, I have promised myself several times that I will endeavour to write more frequent (perhaps even weekly!) progress updates to make the process somewhat less painful. Unfortunately, as is far too common for me in such matters, I've never ended up doing this. Still, there's no time like the present, and if I start now, I might even be able t ...
General Progress Update
As usual, a great deal has happened in the last few months. Perhaps the most exciting happening for NVDA users was the release of NVDA 0.6p2, which we believe is a major step forward in stability and functionality for NVDA. As such, NVDA 0.6p2 is now the recommended release for most users. The old stable release, NVDA 0.5, is no longer recommended. This release followed the NVDA hack fest in June, which, as well as a lot of other [wiki:NVDAHack? ...
NVDA 0.6p2 released!
NVDA 0.6p2 has just been released. The release is almost two weeks later than the original estimate proposed at the recent hack fest, as we decided to implement some additional noteworthy features, user interface changes, bug fixes and documentation updates.
Please note that this is a preview release, meaning that there are still some major issues to be fixed before the final 0.6 release. For more information about the current status of releases, see [ReleaseStatus ...
NVDA Featured in Yahoo UI Blog Post About Tab View Accessibility
NVDA features prominently in this post (and accompanying video) on the Yahoo UI blog: Enhancing TabView Accessibility with WAI-ARIA Roles and States
This highlights one of the great benefits and potential uses of NVDA. The fact that NVDA is free and open source software allows developers to test the accessibility of their web sites and/or applications with a fully functional screen reader without having to purchase an expensive product they ...
NVDA Hack Fest June 2008
Last week, Mick and I met in person in Melbourne, Australia for the second NVDA hack fest. It was a rather intense, brain-melting five days. Despite the name "hack fest", we actually didn't do a great deal of serious coding/hacking. Much of the time was spent in gruelling discussion and debate. We did some long overdue planning of NVDA milestones. In particular, we decided to make another preview release, 0.6p2, to be released by 25 July. We also covered difficu ...
Now Using 7-Zip Self-extracting Archives
We are now using 7-Zip self-extracting archives instead of zip archives; i.e. for portable NVDA snapshots and the NVDA Miscellaneous Dependencies package. 7-Zip archives provide better compression than zip archives and thus facilitate smaller file sizes. Also, self-extracting archives are more convenient for some users. If you want to perform operations other than extracting the entire archive, you can open these archives using ...
New NVDA Miscellaneous Dependencies Package (version 2008-06-26-01)
A new version of the NVDA Miscellaneous Dependencies package has been released. This version rearranges some files, which was necessary to fix #122.
This will be included in NVDA snapshots from r2161.
Users running from source must update to this new version if running r2160 or later.
Project Contributors
The following people and organisations have contributed in some way to the NVDA project: Michael Curran, James Teh, Peter Vagner, Victor Tsaran, The Mozilla Foundation, Aleksey Sadovoy, Cleverson Casarin Uliana, Jani Kinnunen, Ali Savas, David Parduhn, Luca Maianti, Simone Dal Maso, Michel Such, Pierre Beauchamp, coscell Kao, Rui Batista, Serotek Corporation, J.J. Meddaugh, Juan C. buno, Tamás Géczy, Ângelo Miguel, Tomas Valusek, Jaromir Vit, David Picon, Enrique Varela, Halena rojas, Eric Yip, Dang Hoai Phuc, Jason Custer, Willem van der Walt, Bozenka Gogolakova, Dmitry Kaslin, DOROTA CZAJKA, Diogo Costa, Katsutoshi Tsuji, Amy Curran, Mathew Mirabella, and Jonathan Duddington.
NVDA is supported by 