In-Process 18th December 18

Welcome to the last In-Process for 2018!

What a year it has been! While it has been a busy year, that doesn’t mean we’re letting it end quietly. The big news today is the release of NVDA 2018.4.

NVDA 2018.4

Download NVDA 2018.4 from the official downloads page or read the full what’s new here.

Emojis

So, what are emojis? Back in the olden days, when I was young, and dinosaurs roamed the earth, electronic messaging such as email, SMS or instant messaging (remember ICQ?) only allowed you to send ASCII text – characters you could type on the keyboard. This gave rise to “emoticons”, such as the smiley 🙂 which allowed some emotion to be conveyed. Emoticons have evolved into emojis. Emojis are more complex images which can behave in many ways like a regular text character. The smiley is available, as are more complex emoji such as coffee, fire trucks, and mountain biking.

And in an ironic twist, the smiley I write with a colon, hyphen and close parenthesis gets rendered as an emoji, but the emojis I inserted do not! So, a lesson there that emojis can be both fun and informative, but there is no guarantee they work everywhere, so if you do use them, try not to rely on them as the only way of conveying information.

Various programs and websites support emojis on all platforms. For those running Windows 10, there is a built-in emoji input panel in the OS itself. To use Windows 10’s emoji input panel, press either WINDOWS+. or WINDOWS+; (WINDOWS key with either full-stop / period or semi-colon). From here you can do three things: 1) Use the arrow keys to select an emoji from the current screen. The panel is a grid, 8 columns wide by as many rows as needed. Press ENTER to insert the currently selected emoji into your document or edit box etc. 2) Press TAB to move to the categories, then use the ARROWs to select a category and ENTER to open it. Then press TAB to move to the emoji in that category and see option 1 above. 3) Type something to describe the emoji you are looking for, eg “cake”, “train”, or “christmas tree”. Then, use the arrows to find the emoji you want from those which match what you have typed so far.

You can also press ESCAPE to close the emoji input panel.

Emojis should work in most programs and many websites. There are some places and older programs which only accept plain text. If you try to insert an emoji and return from the emoji panel to find nothing has been inserted, you may not be able to use emojis in that program.

When reading, NVDA treats emojis as part of the text. They are read whenever NVDA’s punctuation level is set to “Some”, “Most” or “All”. You can change NVDA’s punctuation level on the fly by pressing NVDA+p. You can also change punctuation level from the “speech settings” options. Press NVDA+control+v, then using TAB to move to the “Punctuation/Symbol level” option.

New Year break

We’d like to thank each and every one of you for your support this year and for helping to make NVDA the great success it is. For those who celebrate it, we wish you a very happy and holy Christmas. To everyone, may you have a very joyous and safe New Year, and on to a wonderful 2019!

NVDA 2018.4.1 Now Available

NV Access is pleased to announce that version 2018.4 of NVDA, the free screen reader for Microsoft Windows, has now been released.

2018.4.1 Update (January 14 2018):

• This release fixes a crash at start up if NVDA’s user interface language is set to Aragonese. (#9089)

Highlights of this release include performance improvements in recent Mozilla Firefox versions, announcement of emojis with all synthesizers, reporting of replied/forwarded status in Outlook, reporting the distance of the cursor to the edge of a Microsoft Word page, and many bug fixes.

Please consider helping NV Access to continue our important work by becoming a monthly donor when downloading NVDA.

Download NVDA 2018.4.1

To find out what’s new in this release, please read What’s new in NVDA 2018.4.1.

NVDA 2018.4rc2 Released

Release Candidate 2 of NVDA 2018.4 is now available for download and testing. For anyone who is interested in trying out what NVDA 2018.4 has to offer before it is officially released, we welcome you to download the beta and provide feedback. This is a release candidate, meaning that unless any critical bugs are found, this will be identical to the final 2018.4 release.

Changes from rc1:

• CHM viewer no longer crashes with particular CHM help files. (#8976)
• A braille display driver no longer fails to load if there is an error when fetching the initial content to display. (#9054)

Highlights of this release include performance improvements in recent Mozilla Firefox versions, announcement of emojis with all synthesizers, reporting of replied/forwarded status in Outlook, reporting the distance of the cursor to the edge of a Microsoft Word page, and many bug fixes.

• Download NVDA 2018.4rc2
• What’s new in this release of NVDA
• Please report any issues on GitHub.

NVDA 2018.4rc1 Released

Release Candidate 1 of NVDA 2018.4 is now available for download and testing. For anyone who is interested in trying out what NVDA 2018.4 has to offer before it is officially released, we welcome you to download the beta and provide feedback. This is a release candidate, meaning that unless any critical bugs are found, this will be identical to the final 2018.4 release.

Changes from Beta3:

• For those testing the experimental UI Automation support in Microsoft Word, blank table cells are no longer ignored by NVDA.
• Updated translations

Highlights of this release include performance improvements in recent Mozilla Firefox versions, announcement of emojis with all synthesizers, reporting of replied/forwarded status in Outlook, reporting the distance of the cursor to the edge of a Microsoft Word page, and many bug fixes.

Note: Using this release candidate with Mozilla Firefox version 63 or earlier, on rare occasions certain changes to data in tables may not be correctly reflected in browse mode. In these cases, manually refresh NVDA’s virtual buffer with NVDA+f5. Mozilla Firefox 64 (hopefully released before the end of this month) fixes this bug.

• Download NVDA 2018.4rc1
• What’s new in this release of NVDA
• Please report any issues on GitHub.

NVDA 2018.4beta3 Released

Beta3 of NVDA 2018.4 is now available for download and testing. For anyone who is interested in trying out what NVDA 2018.4 has to offer before it is officially released, we welcome you to download the beta and provide feedback.

Changes from Beta2:

• Fix bug where table cells in Libre Office Calc were always reporting as ‘unselected’.
• Fix bug where reporting distance of the cursor to the edge of a page in Microsoft Word was not taking paragraph indenting into account.
• Fix bug where editing a punctuation symbol (such as an emoji) but not providing a replacement would cause speech to completely fail.
• Updated translations

Highlights of this release include performance improvements in recent Mozilla Firefox versions, announcement of emojis with all synthesizers, reporting of replied/forwarded status in Outlook, reporting the distance of the cursor to the edge of a Microsoft Word page, and many bug fixes.

Note: Using this beta with Mozilla Firefox version 63 or earlier, on rare occasions certain changes to data in tables may not be correctly reflected in browse mode. In these cases, manually refresh NVDA’s virtual buffer with NVDA+f5. Mozilla Firefox 64 (hopefully released before the end of this month) fixes this bug.

• Download NVDA 2018.4beta3
• What’s new in this release of NVDA
• Please report any issues on GitHub.

In-Process 28th November 2018

Welcome to In-Process for this last week in November. Although In-Process might have been quiet lately, rest assured we’ve all been busy as we work towards NVDA 2018.4.

Pertuni seminar

Earlier this month, NV Access was honoured with an invitation to speak at a seminar for students. Organised by Persatuan Tunanetra Indonesia (Pertuni), the seminar was in Jakarta, Indonesia. Mick’s speech inspired the students and the questions asked were very insightful. The students were excited to meet the creator of the software which makes it possible for them to access a computer. After the seminar, we had the opportunity to explore the fascinating city of Jakarta. We are grateful to Yudi Utomo, the moderator of Mick’s session, and our translator Rina. We would also like to thank Aria Indrawati, the president of Pertuni, for her generous invitation.

Mick Curran, Quentin Christensen, Yudi Utomo and Rina at the National monument in Jakarta

Beta releases

As this edition goes to print (goes to screen? Goes to web?) we are at NVDA 2018.4beta2. Since we changed our release process earlier this year, I thought a recap of what an NVDA beta release is would be helpful.

NVDA has three types of pre-release builds which anyone can test: “Alpha”, “Beta”, and “RC” (or “Release Candidate”).

For those interested in testing the latest “bleeding edge code”, we have our “alpha” releases. These come out a few times a week, sometimes several in a day and have the very latest code in them. While they may not always work as expected, they are one of the first ways of testing new features or bug fixes.

A month or so before a new version is due, the first “beta” release comes out. This release is more stable than alpha releases. Beta releases are a great way of testing fixes and features which are most likely to make it into the next version. Having people test these versions is also crucial to find bugs before they make their way into the final version.

A couple of weeks before the new version, the final phase of testing is the “release candidate” builds. We need as many people as possible testing these builds. If no problems are found here, the only difference between the RC and the final version is the name. The more people who test beta and RC builds, the less likely we will need to go to a minor release after the stable version.

If you’d like to try out the latest beta version, visit the NVDA 2018.4beta2 release announcement page.

If you’d like more detail about the full release process read the Release Process page.

How to test beta and rc builds

Running snapshot builds of NVDA is the same as running a stable build. For release candidates and beta releases, we put out an announcement with information about what is new and a link to download. Here is the release announcement for NVDA 2018.4 beta2. At any time, download current snapshot builds from the Snapshots page.

Once downloaded, run the executable file. After playing a sound to indicate it is starting, the license agreement opens. Read the agreement, then press TAB to the checkbox and press SPACEBAR to agree to it. There are four options:

“Install NVDA on this computer”. This option installs NVDA on the computer, replacing any existing installed version. Once installed, RC builds prompt to update to new RC builds and then the final stable build. Beta builds prompt to update to new beta builds, then to RC builds and the final stable build. To get back to beta testing for the next release you will need to manually download a new beta for that release.

“Create portable copy”. This option creates a portable copy of NVDA in a directory you choose. Portable versions have some limitations, but you can test most features. This avoids going through the license agreement each time or overwriting the installed version.

“Continue running”. This option closes the dialog and continues running the temporary copy of NVDA. This is useful for testing features of this build without installing it.

“Exit”. I’m sure you can figure this one out. 🙂

If you find any bugs, or have any other feedback, there are several ways to let us know. Feel free to create an issue on Github, post in the user Email group, or send us an email.

What is new?

So, what is coming in NVDA 2018.4? From the What’s new: “Highlights of this release include performance improvements in recent Mozilla Firefox versions, announcement of emojis with all synthesizers, reporting of replied/forwarded status in Outlook, reporting the distance of the cursor to the edge of a Microsoft Word page, and many bug fixes.”

Full details in the NVDA 2018.4beta2 What’s new.

And for those who have used Beta1, here’s what’s changed in Beta 2:

Changes from Beta1:

Reverted #8869: Browse Mode: don’t refuse to report focus changes for replaced controls or focused ancestors. This was causing many other focused controls to be reported twice in Browse mode.

Updated translations

Note: Using this beta with Mozilla Firefox version 63 or earlier, on rare occasions certain changes to data in tables may not be correctly reflected in browse mode. In these cases, manually refresh NVDA’s virtual buffer with NVDA+f5. Mozilla Firefox 64 (hopefully released before the end of this month) fixes this bug.

Remember to grab the beta to try out from The NVDA 2018.4beta2 announcement page.

That’s all this time around. Next time, we will be almost ready to release NVDA 2018.4 stable and we look forward to joining you again then!

NVDA 2018.4beta2 Released

Beta2 of NVDA 2018.4 is now available for download and testing. For anyone who is interested in trying out what NVDA 2018.4 has to offer before it is officially released, we welcome you to download the beta and provide feedback.

Changes from Beta1:

• Reverted #8869: BrowseMode: don’t refuse to report focus changes for replaced controls or focused ancestors. This was causing many other focused controls to be reported twice in Browse mode.
• Updated translations

Highlights of this release include performance improvements in recent Mozilla Firefox versions, announcement of emojis with all synthesizers, reporting of replied/forwarded status in Outlook, reporting the distance of the cursor to the edge of a Microsoft Word page, and many bug fixes.

Note: Using this beta with Mozilla Firefox version 63 or earlier, on rare occasions certain changes to data in tables may not be correctly reflected in browse mode. In these cases, manually refresh NVDA’s virtual buffer with NVDA+f5. Mozilla Firefox 64 (hopefully released before the end of this month) fixes this bug.

• Download NVDA 2018.4beta2
• What’s new in this release of NVDA
• Please report any issues on GitHub.

NVDA 2018.4 Beta1 Released for Testing

Beta1 of NVDA 2018.4 is now available for download and testing. For anyone who is interested in trying out what NVDA 2018.4 has to offer before it is officially released, we welcome you to download the beta and provide feedback.

Highlights of this release include performance improvements in recent Mozilla Firefox versions, announcement of emojis with all synthesizers, reporting of replied/forwarded status in Outlook, reporting the distance of the cursor to the edge of a Microsoft Word page, and many bug fixes.

Note: Using this beta with Mozilla Firefox version 63 or earlier, on rare occasions certain changes to data in tables may not be correctly reflected in browse mode. In these cases, manually refresh NVDA’s virtual buffer with NVDA+f5. Mozilla Firefox 64 (hopefully released before the end of this month) fixes this bug.

• Download NVDA 2018.4beta1
• What’s new in this release of NVDA
• Please report any issues on GitHub.

In-Process 26th October 2018

Wow, the year is flying by! Last time In-Process came out, we were in the midst of a flurry of releases. We apologise for the extra updates, but think NVDA 2018.3.2 is our best yet! NVDA 2018.3.2 fixes several crashes which didn’t affect everyone but were severe for those affected.

NVDA 2018.3.2

So, after all the dust clears, what’s new? Firstly, a heap of compatibility improvements! We added support for a couple of new Braille displays, and no less than FIVE new Braille tables. Many Braille displays are now able to be auto-detected when starting NVDA. Not all displays can be auto-detected, but the list will keep growing.

We’ve continued to build on support for new and updated Windows 10 features such as the Emoji panel. You can bring up the Emoji panel in Windows 10 by pressing either WINDOWS+; or WINDOWS+. (that is, WINDOWS and SEMI-COLON or WINDOWS and FULL STOP).

There’s plenty more new features and updates in the latest version. If you haven’t already, be sure to check them out on the NVDA 2018.3 What’s New page.

Predictive Text

Predictive text is another Windows 10 feature which has been around for a couple of updates. I only encountered it recently, so I thought I’d share it here. Smartphone keyboards offer to complete the word you are typing based on what you’ve typed so far. You can do the same thing in Windows 10 running the 1803 update (April 2018) or later. To enable the feature:

1. Search for “Show text suggestions as I type” in the start menu.
2. Press ENTER to open the “Typing” settings screen. The first options on the screen relate to the software keyboard. That on-screen keyboard is used when running Windows 10 on a tablet or in tablet mode.
3. Press TAB to move past the software keyboard. TAB past the “AI Grouping, Typing insights” option to “Show text suggestions as I type”.
4. Press SPACEBAR to enable this option.

With predictive text enabled, words appear above the caret when you are typing. Type at least one letter of a word and instead of reporting only the letter, NVDA reads a whole suggested word. To access suggestions, press the UP ARROW to move to the first suggestion. From there, use the RIGHT or LEFT Arrows to move between the three suggestions. Press ENTER on any of the words to accept it. or ESCAPE to close the suggestions without accepting any suggestions.

This feature works in many places including Word, Notepad, and Firefox. There are some places it doesn’t work. I found suggestions were not offered in NotePad++, for instance.

White Cane Day support

The 12th of October was White Cane Day. This day promotes awareness of blindness. Advancements in access for blind people all over the world are also celebrated. On the 12th, one of our wonderful supporters ran a charity live stream gaming session on Twitch. It was a great chance to spread the good word about NVDA, and raise some donations for NV Access. We are very grateful to “Glitched Vision” for his initiative and generosity. He moderates a community of disabled streamers. Some of the gamers are blind or vision impaired, and some have other disabilities. If you’re a gamer, check out Glitched Vision on Twitch and Twitter!

Thank-you very much to all those who participated and donated through the live stream event!

Customising NVDA profiles

Someone asked for help changing how fast NVDA reads when you have it read from the current point onwards. We call this command “Say All” and you invoke it by pressing NVDA+down arrow or NVDA+a. Say All uses its own configuration profile. A profile is like a set of NVDA settings. Profiles can be triggered by going into a certain program, or when using Say all, or they can be activated manually. A profile for Firefox, for instance, can be set to read differently when reading web pages, to the way NVDA reads when writing a document in Word. It can even have it use a different synthesizer if you want.

EDIT: My initial instructions here assumed a “Say all” profile already existed, however, I have updated it now to work whether you have an existing say all profile or not

To customise how Say All reads:

1. Press NVDA+control+p to open the configuration profiles dialog (or press NVDA+n, then C)
2. Press down arrow to look for a profile called “Say All”. If a Say All profile does not already exist, jump down to the heading 3 instructions below to create a new profile first
3. Tab once to “Manual activate” and press enter. The profile is loaded, and the dialog closes. NVDA is now using the Say All profile
4. Make any changes you like. Adjust the speed, change the synthesizer or the punctuation level. These are done as you would normally via the settings screens or keystrokes. Any changes affect the Say All profile because that is what is loaded currently
5. Open the configuration profiles dialog again (NVDA+control+p or NVDA+n then c)
6. Press TAB once to the “Manual deactivate” button and press enter to deactivate the profile. NVDA returns to the normal profile and will use the settings you just adjusted when you use Say all

To create a new profile:

1. If creating a profile to be triggered by a specific program, first open that program and ensure it is active
2. Press NVDA+control+p to open the configuration profiles dialog (or press NVDA+n, then C).
3. Press alt+n to create a new profile
4. If setting up a profile which will only be activated manually (not triggered by say all or a program), type a name
5. Press tab to move to the “Use this profile for” radio button. The focus starts on “Manual activation”
6. To choose the current application or say all, press the right arrow
7. Press enter to create the profile. Both dialogs close and the profile is active. Make any changes to NVDA’s settings that you want to use for the profile
8. If the profile is triggered manually, or by Say All, open the configuration profiles dialog again with NVDA+control+p, then Tab once to “Manual deactivate” and press enter

Some settings, such as those on the “General” page which affect the whole program, can’t be saved in a profile.

You can read more about custom profiles in the NVDA User Guide

For more in-depth information and step-by-step activities, be sure to check out our “Basic Training for NVDA” material, available in electronic text, hardcopy Braille and audio from The NV Access Shop What programs do you have customised profiles setup for?

Finally today, a quick question for anyone who can spare 30 seconds to give us some feedback: Have there been times when NVDA announcing ‘clickable’ on the web has been useful to you? We do not need to hear negative responces to this as we well know a lot of people hate this feature already. For instance, have their been times where ‘clickable’ on an inaccessible website has communicated to you that you should activate some particular text to do an action?

To share your thoughts, please Email us and let us know your experience!

That’s all for this time around. Enjoy setting up your own configuration profiles. Also, let us know if you use predictive text in Windows 10.

In-Process 25 September 2018

Breaking news 26/09: What a busy time! Now also announcing NVDA 2018.3.2 for your downloading and enjoyment. As usual, being a “point” release, it only addresses one specific, but severe crash – this time, a crash in Google Chrome when navigating tweets on the Twitter website. Everything else below is still correct, and please download the update from the 2018.3 links below

What a busy couple of weeks! As promised, since our last edition, NVDA 2018.3 did indeed come out. Not only that, but NVDA 2018.3.1 hot on its heels. The big news to start though, is the answer to the question on everyone’s lips: NVDA Remote and NVDA 2018.3.1? So, let’s address that first (with its own heading and everything):

NVDA Remote and NVDA 2018.3.1

First, I’ll give a bit of background for those interested. If that’s TL;DR, then jump straight down to the NVDA Remote update below.

Ok, thanks for sticking around! Now, excuse me while I get technical for just a paragraph dons a lab coat, Bill Nye style. As you likely know, “Python” is the programming language that most of NVDA is written in. wxPython is the user interface toolkit that we use with Python. Essentially, it’s what gives NVDA things like a menu, dialog boxes and buttons. It means we don’t need to reinvent the wheel by defining what a “button” is and how it appears from scratch. We then use Python to tell the computer what to do when a user presses that button. With NVDA 2018.3, we moved to a newer version of wxPython, 4.0.3. While that enables us to do lots of new, improved things under the hood, it meant that older add-ons needed to be updated to work with the newer version of wxPython.

The NVDA Remote team tested an early beta of NVDA using wxPython 4.0.3, and implemented a fix for NVDA Remote well before NVDA 2018.3 was released. They made the code available as their “master” branch. While others could try it, they would initially have to build it themselves. They promised that they would package and release the new version as soon as NVDA 2018.3 came out. They did not want to release before then, because the update was not backwards compatible (so, it wouldn’t work with NVDA 2018.2.1).

NVDA Remote update

As the NVDA Remote team have not released a new version, we are very grateful to reliable, long-term contributor Joseph Lee. Joseph has kindly packaged and made the update available for the community. Download the NVDARemote update from Joseph Lee’ site. Thank-you Joseph!

This version works with NVDA 2018.3.1, so we do recommend updating both NVDA and NVDA Remote to the latest versions.

NVDA 2018.3.1

NVDA 2018.3 dropped on September 17 with all the new features we’d promised. We are very thankful to our incredibly helpful Alpha, Beta and “Release Candidate” testers who picked up numerous bugs that were able to be addressed before launch. Unfortunately, one slipped through, which caused the 32-bit version of Firefox to crash (users of the 64-bit version weren’t affected).

We released NVDA 2018.3.1 on September 19, which addresses that crash. We would encourage all users to upgrade to that version, particularly now that there is Joseph’s fix for NVDA Remote.

We are also hoping to encourage even more users to try out the release candidate builds in future. So, please look out for those later in the year, shortly before the next version of NVDA is released.

Finally, if you haven’t yet updated to NVDA 2018.3.1, one last plug for the new features to entice you. Highlights of this release include automatic detection of many Braille displays, support for new Windows 10 features including the Windows 10 Emoji input panel, and many other bug fixes. You can download NVDA from the usual place at https://www.nvaccess.org/download/

For those interested, here is a link to the complete and unabridged version of What’s new in NVDA 2018.3.1.

That’s all for this edition. Until next time, do let us know on Twitter what your favourite new feature of 2018.3 is!