The team has been busy through the middle of April. We have a couple of things you can enjoy now, and a few things that will make their way into upcoming releases of NVDA.
Reef has continued his work on Aria. This month implementing NVDA’s support for Aria Placeholder. Reef has also been working on a presentation for the upcoming NVDACon. The presentation will be a great opportunity to hear from NV Access’ most media shy member. It will also provide some great insights into the triage process, as well as information on how YOU can help! See https://www.nvdacon.org/ for full information about NVDACon and how to take part.
Jamie has been enthusiastic in hunting down, debugging and reporting bugs in Chrome. He has also tackled Liblouis issues related to the input of UEB grade 2.
Mick traveled to Sweden for the Funka Accessibility Days conference. In Stockholm, he presented to web developers from around the world.
Mick Curran presenting at Funka Accessibility Days in Stockholm, Sweden.
Image credit to Antonio Santos @akwyz
Quentin has been working on new sections of the Microsoft Excel with NVDA module. The module will be out later this year. This month has focussed on some of the formatting features in Excel. Topics include formatting numbers through to conditional formatting based on cell contents.
This week the team have all come together in Brisbane. We have brainstormed issues, with the benefit of working together in one room. One issue has been tossing around ideas for how best to deal with “clickable” web elements. This is quite challenging, knowing an element is “clickable” is useful in some cases. In other situations, “clickable” is both repetitive and not useful. Together, we are working on a solution which we hope will be effective for the majority of websites.
NV Access team (from left: Mick, Reef, Quentin and Jamie) in Brisbane, April 2017
Another issue we have started preparation on is something we call “speech refactor”. What we are planning is a complete reworking of NVDA’s aging speech code. This will enable NVDA to support new features in the future. Such features include switching synthesizers or speech rate for different languages or maths. Using sounds or voice changes for different text formatting is another potential feature.
We have also recorded interviews for a new video. The video will highlight the wonderful impact NVDA has for users. In particular, those in developing countries. This is a very exciting project; we look forward to having more information to share with you in a few months’ time.
The Windows 10 “Creators Update” is slowly making its way to users of Windows 10. For anyone running NVDA 2017.1, rest assured this version works well in the Creators Update. The Creators Update brings improvements to many areas for NVDA users. These include text echo in UWP apps and Edge, as well as changes to audio ducking.
The new NV Access logo is starting to make an appearance. This is an exciting transformation to the NV Access image. I’ll leave you with that little teaser! Ok, a description of the new logo does come with the NVDA Expert Certification certificate. Don’t worry, we will definitely make a description available on the website in due course.