Last Week in NVDA (27 Oct)

Probably the most exciting happening last week was the promised merge of initial support for braille displays into the main NVDA code. There is still a lot of work to do, but the current implementation is quite useable. There were quite a few changes after the merge to fix issues and allow braille display support to be included in binary snapshots. Also, Mick added a driver for Freedom Scientific Focus/Pacmate displays, which means these can now be used without installing BRLTTY. There is one particular optimisation yet to be done which should vastly improve the performance of the braille code when the focus changes. Code needs to be added to allow keys on displays to trigger scripts in NVDA so that, for example, pressing a key will move to the previous line. (Scrolling and cursor routing is already possible, but this is currently supported directly in the drivers.) NVDA currently cannot display control fields when reading documents in braille, which means that you cannot identify links, form fields, etc. on web pages. These are just a few of the currently known issues; I'm sure there are many more to be discovered. Nevertheless, it is very exciting to finally have support for braille displays in NVDA. Happy testing!

On a related note, I created an installer for the Windows version of BRLTTY using NSIS. Aside from copying BRLTTY to the system, this installer automatically installs and starts BRLTTY as a service. It does not currently provide any facilities for GUI configuration of BRLTTY. You can download an installer for BRLTTY 3.10-2.

The virtual buffer library refactoring saga continued. Although we had initially intended to integrate the virtual buffer in-process injection code with NVDAHelper, Mick discovered that this was not going to be practical due to the virtual buffer library being separate from NVDAHelper. In order for our initial idea to work, the code needs to be integrated at some level, particularly the build process. Going forward, we will probably end up merging the virtual buffer library into NVDAHelper. This is unfortunate in some ways, as it means that it cannot be distributed as a separate package which is immediately useable by other projects, but it is becoming too difficult to maintain it as a separate library, primarily due to its in-process nature. People will certainly still be able to borrow and reuse the code. All of this aside, Mick was able to successfully create a test virtual buffer and interact with it from another process using the new library. The Gecko back-end still needs to be adapted for the new library. Also, NVDA needs to be updated for the new library. This cannot be done until automatic virtual buffer pass-through is merged with the main code.

There are quite a few questions, problems, etc. that appear time and time again on the NVDA mailing lists. This finally prompted me to create some wiki articles to make this information more readily available.

• FAQ answers general frequently asked questions about NVDA.
• ApplicationSupport provides details about NVDA's support for specific applications, including commonly encountered problems and solutions.
• Troubleshooting provides information about and resolutions for problems commonly encountered by NVDA users.

These are rather limited in content at present, but hopefully, they will grow into useful resources for NVDA users. Please feel free to improve them!