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

NVDA Hack Fest November 2008

I joined Mick in Melbourne on Sunday, 9 November for the third NVDA hack fest. Discussion during the hack fest included significant changes and additions to the design of NVDA, organisation of the source code, optimisation of the braille support, project management and policy, and solutions to some long-standing problems. See NVDAHackFestNov2008 for detailed technical notes on the major topics of discussion.

Aside from discussion, we did quite a bit of coding as we had hoped. The first ...

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Weekly Update for 11 Nov

I didn't have a chance to write a weekly update last week due to the promised hack fest, which I will discuss in another post.

Here are the noteworthy changes to NVDA in the week prior to the hack fest:

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NVDA Updated for Python 2.6

NVDA has been updated to work with Python 2.6. (In fact, it now requires Python 2.6 and will not work with Python 2.5.) Aside from the great new features in Python 2.6 which we can now use, this is the first stepping stone in the eventual move to Python 3.0.

Those running binary snapshots do not need to do anything; new snapshots will be built with the appropriate pa ...

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Last Week in NVDA (3 Nov)

There wasn't much noteworthy activity to report about last week, aside from NVDA 0.6p2 passing 10000 downloads, about which I already reported. The one noteworthy change in NVDA was Mick's introduction of an NVDA specific dialog which allows the user to edit the content of a cell in Microsoft Excel. This dialog appears when you press f2 to edit a cell. This is necessary because the formula bar in Microsoft Excel is inaccessible to NVDA. It is onl ...

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NVDA 0.6p2 Passes 10000 Downloads!

There have now been over 10000 downloads of NVDA 0.6p2 since its release on 7 August, less than three months ago. At the time of this writing, there have been 10459 downloads. Thank you to all of you for your support. NVDA certainly wouldn't be what it is without the fantastic community that surrounds it.

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 u ...

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Last Week in NVDA (20 Oct)

The major addition to braille support last week was support for the review cursor. Braille can now be tethered to either the system focus/caret or the review position. When tethered to the review position, the display is updated when the review position changes and the routing keys move the review position if appropriate. Unfortunately, there is currently no user friendly way to change this tether mode; it must be done via the Python console. This will be resolved some time this week ...

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Last Week in NVDA (13 Oct)

The major highlight in the land of braille support last week was the implementation of initial support for braille in virtual buffers. The text of virtual buffers is displayed in braille when a virtual buffer gains focus. The virtual caret is tracked, and both scrolling the display and cursor routing can move the virtual caret. NVDA correctly switches between browsing the document and displaying the control with focus when pass through mode is disabled and enabled, respectively. Cont ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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.