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), implemented initial code to move the mouse to the character under the review cursor in certain editable text controls. Previously, NVDA could only move the cursor to the centre of the current navigator object. This enhancement allows users to click on specific characters or the character under the cursor, which is necessary in certain situations. It may also be useful for communicating a specific point in a document to sighted observers.

Last week, I primarily continued my work on implementing braille display support in NVDA. When Mick attempted to test the work so far, we discovered that the liblouis Python bindings developed by Eitan Isaacson for Orca misbehave quite severely in Windows Vista. I spent hours on this issue and still could not fathom why this occurs, as they work fine for me in Windows XP and obviously work fine in Linux. I couldn't find anything in the code or build options that should cause problems under Windows Vista. We ended up developing our own bindings using ctypes. This will probably be easier in the longrun anyway, as maintaining and building Python C extensions can be tedious, especially under Windows. I spent quite some time working on some bugs in liblouis. During the week, liblouis 1.3.9 was released, which, among other changes, fixes some issues affecting NVDA which I raised not long before. Thanks, John! Towards the end of the week, I did some more work related to braille and editable text controls, as well as fixing some annoying bugs. My last piece of work for the week was implementing a very basic braille settings dialog, which currently allows the user to choose the braille display and translation table to be used.

As well as helping me to test braille support, Mick continued his refactoring of the virtual buffer library which I described in my last update. He is making steady progress, but there is still quite a bit to be done before a new version of the library containing these changes can be released.