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 difficult topics such as support for tables, better implementation of formatting support, flexible mapping of widgets to NVDAObjects, centralisation of key bindings for NVDAObjects and virtual buffers, language detection and automatic voice change, live regions, and hierarchical documents (e.g. Lotus Symphony and OpenOffice). See NVDAHackFestJun2008 for full details of the topics and outcomes.