As I begin writing this, I'm sitting on a plane enduring the 13 hour flight back to Sydney from Los Angeles. As many of you know, the week prior to CSUN was insanely busy, as Mick and I hurried to make the 0.6p1 release in time for the conference. (In fact, we ended up deferring the release until soon after we arrived in the U.S.) CSUN was similarly busy, which, alongside far too little sleep, has left us exhausted. Despite a consequent need for some serious R&R, CSUN 2008 was an absolutely fantastic experience, both for NVDA and for Mick and I personally.

We arrived in L.A. late on Monday morning and were settled into our hotel room by around lunch time. No one else we knew was to arrive before Tuesday afternoon, so we spent the first two days working on some final touches for 0.6p1, which was released some time on Tuesday afternoon. (Unfortunately, we also had to endure a dodgy internet connection during this work, which persisted in its dodginess throughout the week. Arrrg!) We also burnt around 30 CDs containing NVDA, Firefox 3beta4 and information about both for distribution to potential new users whom we encountered during the conference.

10 a.m. on Wednesday morning saw us at the IAccessible2 face to face meeting. This ended up exceeding its 1 hour time slot by almost another hour! Discussion was quite broad, covering IAccessible2 itself but also extending beyond into many other topics relating to open accessibility standards. Nevertheless, i think the meeting was very successful. We were told that IAccessible2 support for OpenOffice?.org would hopefully ship in a 3.x release some time within the next year, which is very exciting. There was a great deal of discussion in terms of the future of IAccessible2, especially relating to the establishment of guidelines beyond the specification for application implementations. Currently, there are widely varying ideas on how IAccessible2 should be implemented, with applications such as Lotus Symphony taking a rather flat approach as compared with Mozilla Gecko's extremely hierarchical approach. Mick and I believe that there need to be guidelines for the ways in which IAccessible2 should be implemented in various applications to prevent this getting out of hand. This idea was met with overall approval and a great deal of discussion ensued as to how this might be achieved. Other issues included problems with the use of IAccessible2 for portable applications and assistive technologies, feedback regarding Accessibility Probe, problems with the dependence of IAccessible 2 on MSAA and potential minor changes to the specification. Aside from the useful outcomes, it was great for me to meet the team behind this excellent accessibility API face to face.

On Wednesday evening, we had a dinner meeting with the NVDA Japanese localisation team. Our meeting spanned several hours, although it was interrupted several times by the need to adjourn to different locations. We discussed the status of the NVDA Japanese localisation and a demonstration was given with a commercial Japanese speech engine. We then covered a couple of localisation problems. The first concerned certain Japanese punctuation marks which aren't handled by the synthesiser used. While we handle expansion of English punctuation marks, there is no provision for doing this for other language specific symbols. Second, we discussed Windows input method editors (IME), which are necessary for entry of characters in pictographic languages such as Japanese. NVDA currently has no support for this. We would certainly like NVDA to support this, so Mick and I asked many general questions about how this works. We then spoke about the possibility of open source Japanese speech synthesisers. Mick and I suggested that efforts be made to improve the current eSpeak Japanese language so that an additional synthesiser would not be needed for Japanese NVDA users. Finally, the team explained the current state of screen readers in Japan. There are no good free alternatives and Japanese commercial screen readers are quite expensive, which is why they believe NVDA is important for Japan. It was a very pleasant meeting and it was great to receive some face to face feedback from a localisation team.

Thursday was the first day on which the exhibit hall was open. We spent much of our time for the remainder of the conference assisting at the Mozilla booth in the exhibit hall, preaching the goodness of Firefox 3 accessibility and, where appropriate, NVDA. We had very few opportunities to actually demonstrate NVDA. On the other hand, we spoke to many people from widely varying groups and levels of experience and gave away most of our CDs. It was humbling and gratifying to have quite a number of people, both users and otherwise, visit just to tell us that they appreciate the work we're doing. A highlight for us was a visit from a group of vision impaired primary school students accompanied by a teacher. She did not know about NVDA and was very pleased when we told her of the project. She told us that it would be great for some of her students whose families probably could not afford to purchase any of the commercial screen readers and took several of our CDS for her students, even coming back to take more for others. This is a fantastic validation of the mission of NV Access and NVDA: to lower the barrier to accessible computing. Furthermore, young students like these are not biased by prior use of another product, so in some ways, they are perhaps most likely to make the most of NVDA.

In terms of Mozilla, many people, existing users and otherwise, were impressed by the new accessibility features in Firefox 3. Being primarily concerned with accessibility for screen reader users, I must confess to having paid little attention to accessibility features for other users. There was a great deal of interest in the new full page zoom feature for low vision users. As well, the rich accessibility API support offered by Firefox 3 has potential benefits for users of voice dictation software. Again, many people visited just to say that they appreciated the work of Mozilla. There was also a great deal of interest in the merchandise up for grabs, which included an abundance of stickers, badges, temporary tattoos and brochures. Almost all of this had been taken by the end of the conference.

Thursday night was spent at a dinner with all of the people assisting at the Mozilla booth. (Well, actually, we first had to endure a rather frustrating, crazy cab ride, but I digress.) Most were either fellow grantees or people otherwise involved with Mozilla who were volunteering. Frank Hecker, the CEO of the Mozilla Foundation, was also present. It was great to spend an evening with such a fantastic, sincere group of people.

On Friday afternoon, we attended the IAccessible2 development panel, a session open to the public in which "Lead software applications and assistive technology developers [got] together to share their experiences in supporting IAccessible2". Present were representatives from IBM, Dolphin, GW Micro, Sun Microsystems, Freedom Scientific, Ai Squared, Adobe Systems and NV Access, with Mick speaking for NV Access. Each spoke a little about their current implementation of or plans to implement IAccessible2 support, some also speaking of their involvement in its design. Mick spoke of the IAccessible2 support in NVDA and why we believe it to be important for accessibility. He mentioned the current shortcomings in NVDA's support, including the lack of support for tables (which, by the way, is something we want to rectify very soon). Most of the assistive technology developers have also implemented at least partial support for IAccessible2, although some currently use it only for certain applications. We learnt that Adobe are starting to implement support, which is great news for us. In the discussion of problems and future plans, Mick raised the issue of the current inability to run IAccessible2 applications and assistive technologies portably due to the need to register a proxy library. A potential solution was proposed, which we have since investigated and found to be quite promising.

As is often the case at such conferences, even socialising after hours provided a fantastic opportunity for networking. One such occasion was a discussion with some of the core development team for Orca, the open source screen reader for the Gnome GUI under Linux and Solaris. One outcome of this discussion was that both teams agreed to try to collaborate wherever possible. We have always been open to such collaboration, but this was a great opportunity to become properly acquainted. On another occasion, we were introduced to the person at Microsoft responsible for accessibility of Internet Explorer 8.

One of the few conference sessions we attended was on Saturday afternoon. This was entitled "Low-Cost and Free Screen Access Solutions Versus Full-Feature Software" and was presented by the National Federation of the Blind. We had no idea whether NVDA would be covered or how it would fare if it was. Initially, we felt that perhaps the description of the free and low-cost solutions as not being "full-featured software" was a bit unfair, but I guess it is true that we still have a lot of work to do to match some of the more expensive products. Conversely, we were pleasantly surprised by the fair demonstration of NVDA. We waited with bated breath to find out which version of NVDA would be demonstrated and were relieved to discover that 0.6p1, the release we had prepared only days earlier, was featured. (NVDA has certainly come a long way since 0.5.) The other featured screen readers were Thunder and Serotek System Access. Overall, it was a worthwhile presentation and I hope it inspired some people to at least give solutions such as NVDA a try.

Over the duration of the conference, we met and conversed with several key accessibility people from large organisations such as IBM, Sun, Adobe and Microsoft. In addition, we spoke to several people who were interested in collaborating with us in some way or potentially distributing NVDA with their products. It was gratifying once again to realise the respect we have attained in the field of accessibility. We were astounded to learn of the amount of interest NVDA has attracted. Mick and I also took the opportunity on occasion to investigate some of the other exhibits.

Overall, CSUN 2008 was a very enjoyable, benefitial and worthwhile experience, both for NVDA and for us personally. I very much hope that both Mick and I are able to attend the conference again next year.

We have just released NVDA 0.6p1. This is a preview release, meaning that there are still major issues to be fixed before the final 0.6 release. However, this provides a preview of some of the new functionality that can be expected in 0.6. This release will be featured at CSUN 2008. For more information about the current status of releases, see this article.

Download links:

• NVDA 0.6p1 installer
• NVDA 0.6p1 portable [zip file]
• NVDA 0.6p1 changes [text file]