Welcome to another In-Process! The NV Access team are all well rested from CSUN. We’ve caught up on correspondence from while we were away, so thank you for your patience!
Sight City and Babbage
Just as Mick gets back into the swing of things back home, he will be packing again. This time for Frankfurt, Germany, to the Sight City conference.Mick will be attending Sight City with our good friends from Babbage. Mick and Babbage will run several seminars at Sight City. The seminars will outline how distributors can integrate NVDA into their business models. They will also demonstrate using NVDA with Citrix and remote desktop connections. If you are in Frankfurt between April 25 and 27, it is sure to be a great exhibition. Sight City is free to attend, and there is a pick-up service for vision-impaired visitors from the train station and the airport to the exhibition grounds.
Many of our end users outside the Netherlands may not be familiar with who Babbage are. Babbage has been a fantastic supporter of NV Access and the NVDA project over the past year. Leonard de Ruijter, is a prolific contributor of both code and knowledge on GitHub issues. Leonard also represents Babbage on the NVDA Council. The council is an important mechanism to give external companies and stakeholders input into the direction of NVDA. Leonard and Babbage have contributed a lot of valuable input to NVDA and we thank them for their support.
Multi-Category settings dialog
One area Leonard has contributed a lot of code to, is NVDA’s new multi-category settings dialog. We are pleased to share this with you in our latest “Next” build. Remember that snapshot builds, particularly Next builds, are pre-release versions. Next builds may not be completely polished and may have bugs. One thing you may not realise, however, is that you can try out snapshot builds without affecting your stable installed copy of NVDA. Here are the steps:- Download the snapshot build you would like to try.
- Run the executable and wait for the license agreement to be displayed.
- Press tab once and then spacebar to check the “I agree” button to accept the license agreement.
- Press alt+c to activate the “Continue running” button (or press tab to this button then enter).
This will run the snapshot build so you can try out the new settings dialog or any other new features. Be sure to read the “What’s new” item in the help menu which will cover what has changed since the last major release.
When you are done, simply exit NVDA (or shut down the computer). The next time you start your computer or run NVDA with control+alt+n, it will start your original, installed version.
NVDA 2018.1.1
There has been some confusion over the release of NVDA 2018.1.1. NVDA 2018.1.1 was released to fix one specific issue for Windows 10 users. For this reason, we set the download so that users on older operating systems running 2018.1 would not be prompted to update. This was because the new version didn’t change anything on those earlier systems. So if you are running 2018.1 on Windows 7 or 8, you are not missing anything. If you would still like the update, you can download it from the NVDA download page. Users on Windows 10 Spring Creators Update do need NVDA 2018.1.1 (or a newer Snapshot) to use Windows OneCore voices.Update to Eloquence
The Eloquence synthesizer has long been a popular one with screen reader users. Code Factory’s bundle of Eloquence with Vocalizer for NVDA has made it a popular add-on. Recently, Code Factory released an update to this add-on. One of the important features in this version is a fix for an audio problem with Eloquence which affected some users. Anyone using Code Factory’s Voices for NVDA package is encouraged to update. You can download the latest version of the add-on from the Code Factory page.
Access to equal information, a real-world example
We always enjoy hearing from our users around the world. Today, I want to share a heartwarming message we received recently. It illustrates the importance that everyday access to technology for all users makes. An author wanted to share his autobiography with a blind friend but was unsure what format to send. He was amazed that the friend was able to read his original PDF version, including the image captions. Without even considering accessibility, the author and editor had simply followed standard guidelines. This had resulted in the file being formatted as a “tagged” PDF. This illustrates how important it is to embed accessibility in guidelines and procedures. It also demonstrates the need not only for universal access to technology but access to the same technology as everyone else. The author didn’t need to convert the text into a special format, and the NVDA user didn’t need any new software. Thanks to Margaret and Eric for sharing their story!That’s all for this week. If you have anything you’d like to share with us, please don’t hesitate to reach out on Twitter, Facebook, the E-Mail list, or e-mail.