NVDA 2018.2rc3 Released

NVDA 2018.2rc3 has just been released for testing. This is a release candidate, which means that unless any critical issues are found, this will be identical to the final 2018.2 release.

Highlights of this release include Support for tables in Kindle for PC, support for HumanWare BrailleNote Touch and BI14 Braille displays, Improvements to both Onecore and Sapi5 speech synthesizers, improvements in Microsoft Outlook and much more.

Changes from RC2:

• Removed new support for reporting if a message was replied to or forwarded in Microsoft Outlook as it did not work with all languages. (#8353)
• Updated translations

• Download NVDA 2018.2rc3
• What’s new in this release of NVDA
• Please report any issues on GitHub.

NVDA 2018.2rc2 Released

NVDA 2018.2rc2 has just been released for testing. This is a release candidate, which means that unless any critical issues are found, this will be identical to the final 2018.2 release.

Highlights of this release include Support for tables in Kindle for PC, support for HumanWare BrailleNote Touch and BI14 Braille displays, Improvements to both Onecore and Sapi5 speech synthesizers, improvements in Microsoft Outlook and much more.

Changes from RC1:

• Several bugs fixed related to the multi category settings dialog including announcement of the current configuration profile, and handling of numpad enter. (#8253)

• Download NVDA 2018.2rc2
• What’s new in this release of NVDA
• Please report any issues on GitHub.

NVDA 2018.2rc1 Released

NVDA 2018.2rc1 has just been released for testing. This is a release candidate, which means that unless any critical issues are found, this will be identical to the final 2018.2 release.

Highlights of this release include Support for tables in Kindle for PC, support for HumanWare BrailleNote Touch and BI14 Braille displays, Improvements to both Onecore and Sapi5 speech synthesizers, improvements in Microsoft Outlook and much more.

• Download NVDA 2018.2rc1
• What’s new in this release of NVDA
• Please report any issues on GitHub.

NVDACon online conference, June 1 – 3 2018

Hi everyone,

Next weekend, June 1 – 3 2018, is the 5th annual NVDACon. It’s an online conference you can attend from the comfort of your own home. The theme this year is “Future-proofing NVDA”. There are sessions to suit regular users, as well as those interested in the more technical aspects of add-on development. It is free and open to everyone to attend. NVDACon is a great chance to meet other users, add-on developers and members of the NV Access team.

There’s no cost and no RSVP needed, all you need is the TeamTalk software. TeamTalk is a free program which works a bit like Skype, you can have voice conversations, or, as with the NVDACon sessions, simply join and listen to the presenter speaking. There is also a text chat feature, which you can use, for instance, to indicate that you have a question during a presentation without interrupting the speaker.

TeamTalk 5 Classic is the latest version and it works well with NVDA. See the Official TeamTalk 5 Classic page for how to download the program, the NVDA add-on and how to set it up. See also the NVDACon How to join us page for more detailed steps for joining particular conference areas.

Sessions are generally recorded and available to listen to after the conference at https://www.nvdacon.org/ One big advantage of participating during NVDACon is that you can ask questions and participate in the conversation following each session.

The full schedule for NVDACon 2018 will be up on the NVDACon website in the next few days. You can also join the conversation on the NVDA user’s email list.

Note: NV Access is very proud to support the organising committee, in small ways, such as this post, but otherwise, everything for NVDACon is organised entirely by users, for users!

In-Process 15th May 2018

Welcome to another edition of In-Process. A special shout-out to all the mums out there celebrating Mother’s Day around this time. Many countries celebrated Mother’s Day on Sunday (the second Sunday in May). Some celebrate in March, or at other times, such as our friends in Paraguay, who celebrate today, May 15th.

NVDA 2018.2

We’re getting close to NVDA 2018.2 now. We are in translation freeze, which means translators have until the end of next week to update translations for 2018.2. We can then expect to see a release candidate by the end of the month. One of the big new features in 2018.2 is the single settings dialog we’ve already covered. There are plenty of other exciting developments included. Three areas I’ll mention today are table support, speech and Braille:

Tables

There have been some great improvements to experience with tables. Row and column spans are reported in both speech and Braille. Reading and navigation is possible in tables in Kindle PC now. Table navigation commands are now also supported in Google Docs (with Braille mode).

Speech

On Windows 10, NVDA now uses the Windows OneCore Voices as the default synthesizer. NVDA still comes with eSpeak, and this is still the default on earlier versions of Windows. Those on Windows 10 who would like to use eSpeak can do so by changing synthesizer. Note this change is only for new installations and won’t affect existing users.

If the selected OneCore voice is uninstalled, the OneCore synth driver will no longer fail to load. Changing OneCore voices is also faster.

Newer Microsoft SAPI 5 voices no longer lag at the end of speech, making it more efficient to navigate with these voices.

Braille

• Support for the Braillenote Touch, Brailliant BI 14 and HandyTech displays
• You can now toggle control, shift, alt, windows and NVDA from your braille keyboard and combine these modifiers with braille input (e.g. press control+s)
• New translation tables for Lithuanian 8 dot, Ukranian, Mongolian Grade 2
• Ability to report formatting under a specific Braille cell
• Updated LibLouis Braille translator to 3.5.0
• French (Canada) Braille tables have been removed in favour of French (unified)
• Contracted Braille input tables now fall back to uncontracted mode in non-editable cases
• Fixed malformed output for several Braille tables, including capital signs in Danish 8-dot

Certification

This week we welcome our first NVDA Certified Expert from India. As one of our largest user bases, we are very pleased to see India represented on the list of Certified Experts. Not only is accreditation a great addition to your resume, but the ever-growing list of Certified Experts is a fantastic resource to those looking for help. Services provided by Experts vary and may include on-site support, add-in development, or in-person training.

Windows 10 Insider update

Windows 10 insiders this week discovered an issue in the latest insider build. Affected users report problems installing or updating programs, including NVDA. After allowing the program to run at the UAC prompt, the install never completes. Those affected may wish to revert to the previous insider build or wait it out until Microsoft release a new build.

We appreciate our insider users and their patience with such issues when they crop up. It was Windows 10 insiders who first noticed the OneCore voices issue earlier this year. Although necessitating the release of NVDA 2018.1.1, it meant that the issue only affected a limited number of NVDA users. The fix was deployed long before most users received the main April 2018 Windows update which is currently rolling out.

That’s all for this week, have a fantastic fortnight until the next In-Process!

In-Process 26th April 2018

Welcome to this last edition of In-Process for April. Can you believe we are almost a third of the way through 2018 already?

Tek Talk

A special welcome this time around to all the listeners of Tek Talk. Quentin was invited to speak to the program this week about all things NVDA and NV Access. Thank you to Robert Acosta from Accessible World for the opportunity to join you this week. The presentation was very popular, with some very insightful questions at the end. Be sure to visit the Tek Talk page to listen to the episode or to find out more about Tek Talk.

Robert Acosta sent the links mentioned in the presentation to subscribers. For anyone else interested, here are the links to everything mentioned:

NV Access & NVDA:

• The NV Access website
• Download NVDA
• In-Process blog (but you probably already found that)
• The NVDA Certified Expert program
• Watch the new NVDA video (short version)
• Link to help audio describe the new NVDA video (long version)

Ways to contact us:

• E-Mail
• Twitter @NVAccess
• Facebook
• NVDA User E-Mail list

Contribute to the community:

• Participate in NVDACon
• View or file issues on GitHub
• Translate NVDA
• Developer e-mail list

Sight City

Mick is busy over in Frankfurt at Sight City. Mick and Babbage are presenting again at 2pm and 3pm on Thursday and Friday. Any individuals or organisations in Germany this week are most welcome to attend. It is a great opportunity to learn more about the great work both Babbage and NV Access are doing at the moment!

New features in snapshot builds

Meanwhile, back in the office, there has been lots happening. Particularly, there are plenty of exciting new additions in recent Snapshot builds. Last time on In-Process we covered the new settings dialog. Here are some other recent changes worth checking out:

• Notifications from Windows 10 apps such as Calculator and the Windows Store
• New Braille Translation tables for Lithuanian 8 dot, Ukrainian and Mongolian grade 2
• Formatting information for the text under a specific Braille cell
• It is possible to postpone installing detected NVDA updates
• You can now toggle control, shift, alt, windows and NVDA from your braille keyboard. These modifiers can be combined with braille input (e.g. press control+s)
• Restored support for Handy Tech Braillino and Modular (with old firmware) displays

To try these features out now, you will want to download one of our Snapshot builds. The “Next” builds have the very latest cutting-edge code. As a result, occasionally some things may not work exactly as planned. New features “incubate” in Next for at least a fortnight. All going well, these features then graduate to “Master” builds. As a result of this extra testing, “Master” builds should be more robust. Everything in “Master” is intended for the next stable release of NVDA, so should be a little more robust.

Excel problem

1. Have Excel open.
2. Press “alt+f” to open the file menu then press “t” for the options.
3. Press “control+tab” until the focus is on the “Advanced” options page.
4. Press “alt+e” to toggle the “Allow editing directly in cells” option. Ensure that this is unchecked.
5. Press “enter” to save the changes. Editing cell contents should now work again.

• With editing directly in cells enabled, when F2 is pressed, the caret appears in the cell itself. Text which would flow out of the cell flows to the right, then to lines below. Cells covered by this text are hidden while this happens. Text in the edited cell is coloured to highlight cell references and parenthesis.
• With editing directly in cells disabled, when F2 is pressed, the caret appears in the formula bar above the worksheet. Colouring of formula elements is also done in the formula bar rather than the cell while editing. Only text which fits in the cell is visible in the cell while the formula is being edited.

That’s all for this time. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with more information about the upcoming NVDACon, as well as all the happenings between now and then!

In-Process 11th April 2018

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

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

1. Download the snapshot build you would like to try.
2. Run the executable and wait for the license agreement to be displayed.
3. Press tab once and then spacebar to check the “I agree” button to accept the license agreement.
4. 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

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

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.

In-Process 29th March 2018

Wow, March has been such a busy time, I just realised how long it has been since the last In-Process. I do apologise & hope you didn’t miss me too much!

This past week, the NV Access team have been busy at the CSUN Adaptive Technology conference in San Diego California. During the week we had some very productive meetings with others in the industry. I’m sure many great things will come from it over the coming year.

The NV Access team (Quentin, Mick and Reef) at CSUN 2018.

At the conference, NV Access delivered two very well received presentations. “Introducing the new NV Access and redesigned NVDA” covered recent developments. The new promotional video, the updated branding, and all the latest NVDA features were all covered. “Choosing and using NVDA” benefitted those new to screen readers and those supporting users. It covered tips such as downloading, setting up and customising voices, as well as how to work with magnification and where to find our VPAT. The slides from these presentations are available for those wishing to download them.

Introducing the new NV Access and redesigned NVDA

And

Choosing and using NVDA

The team have been very busy, and not only is 2018.1 now out, but we have a follow-up point release: 2018.1.1. In Windows 10’s March update, Microsoft have made a change to the bitrate of the OneCore voices. The new bitrate made them sound very odd in NVDA. Unfortunately, Microsoft made this change at the very last minute, in the final insider build before the public version. We were not expecting it when we released NVDA 2018.1. As users will likely receive the Windows update before NVDA 2018.2 we felt a mid-cycle release was necessary. Read the NVDA 2018.1.1 release notes and download the update.

Finally this week I thought I’d share the full release notes from 2018.1 / 2018.1.1 but before I do, I thought you might like to prepare with this team selfie, looking combat-ready in the belly of a SH-3 Sea King helicopter. On our last day in San Diego we visited USS Midway aircraft carrier. This particular helicopter recovered the crews of five of the Apollo space missions.

NV Access team (Reef, Mick, Quentin) in a helicopter on board USS Midway.

Now, without any further ado, here are all the details from the “what’s new” file for NVDA 2018.1 / 2018.1.1:

2018.1.1

This is a special release of NVDA which addresses a bug in the Onecore Windows Speech synthesizer driver, which was causing it to speak with a higher pitch and speed in Windows 10 Redstone 4 (1803). (#8082)

2018.1

Highlights of this release include support for charts in Microsoft word and PowerPoint, support for new braille displays including Eurobraille and the Optelec protocol converter, improved support for Hims and Optelec braille displays, performance improvements for Mozilla Firefox 58 and higher, and much more.

New Features

• It is now possible to interact with charts in Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint, similar to the existing support for charts in Microsoft Excel. (#7046)
  • In Microsoft Word: When in browse mode, cursor to an embedded chart and press enter to interact with it.
  • In Microsoft PowerPoint when editing a slide: tab to a chart object, and press enter or space to interact with the chart.
  • To stop interacting with a chart, press escape.
• New language: Kyrgyz.
• Added support for VitalSource Bookshelf. (#7155)
• Added support for the Optelec protocol converter, a device that allows one to use Braille Voyager and Satellite displays using the ALVA BC6 communication protocol. (#6731)
• It is now possible to use braille input with an ALVA 640 Comfort braille display. (#7733)
  • NVDA’s braille input functionality can be used with these as well as other BC6 displays with firmware 3.0.0 and above.
• Early support for Google Sheets with Braille mode enabled. (#7935)
• Support for Eurobraille Esys, Esytime and Iris braille displays. (#7488)

Changes

• The HIMS Braille Sense/Braille EDGE/Smart Beetle and Hims Sync Braille display drivers have been replaced by one driver. The new driver will automatically be activated for former syncBraille driver users. (#7459)
  • Some keys , notably scroll keys, have been reassigned to follow the conventions used by Hims products. Consult the user guide for more details.
• When typing with the on-screen keyboard via touch interaction, by default you now need to double tap each key the same way you would activate any other control. (#7309)
  • To use the existing “touch typing” mode where simply lifting your finger off the key is enough to activate it, Enable this option in the new Touch Interaction settings dialog found in the Preferences menu.
• It is no longer necessary to explicitly tether braille to focus or review, as this will happen automatically by default. (#2385)
  • Note that automatic tethering to review will only occur when using a review cursor or object navigation command. Scrolling will not activate this new behavior.

Bug Fixes

• Browseable messages such as showing current formatting when pressing NVDA+f twice quickly no longer fails when NVDA is installed on a path with non-ASCII characters. (#7474)
• Focus is now once again restored correctly when returning to Spotify from another application. (#7689)
• In Windows 10 Fall Creaters Update, NVDA no longer fails to update when Controlled Folder Access is enabled from Windows Defender Security Center. (#7696)
• Detection of scroll keys on Hims Smart Beetle displays is no longer unreliable. (#6086)
• A slight performance improvement when rendering large amounts of content in Mozilla Firefox 58 and later. (#7719)
• In Microsoft Outlook, reading emails containing tables no longer causes errors. (#6827)
• Braille display gestures that emulate system keyboard key modifiers can now also be combined with other emulated system keyboard keys if one or more of the involved gestures are model specific. (#7783)
• In Mozilla Firefox, browse mode now works correctly in pop-ups created by extensions such as LastPass and bitwarden. (#7809)
• NVDA no longer sometimes freezes on every focus change if Firefox or Chrome have stopped responding such as due to a freeze or crash. (#7818)
• In twitter clients such as Chicken Nugget, NVDA will no longer ignore the last 20 characters of 280 character tweets when reading them. (#7828)
• NVDA now uses the correct language when announcing symbols when text is selected. (#7687)
• In recent versions of Office 365, it is again possible to navigate Excel charts using the arrow keys. (#7046)
• In speech and braille output, control states will now always be reported in the same order, regardless whether they are positive or negative. (#7076)
• In apps such as Windows 10 Mail, NVDA will no longer fail to announce deleted characters when pressing backspace. (#7456)
• All keys on the Hims Braille Sense Polaris displays are now working as expected. (#7865)
• NVDA no longer fails to start on Windows 7 complaining about an internal api-ms dll, when a particular version of the Visual Studio 2017 redistributables have been installed by another application. (#7975)

Changes for developers

• Added a hidden boolean flag to the braille section in the configuration: “outputPass1Only”. (#7301, #7693, #7702)
  • This flag defaults to true. If false, liblouis multi pass rules will be used for braille output.
• A new dictionary (braille.RENAMED_DRIVERS) has been added to allow for smooth transition for users using drivers that have been superseded by others. (#7459)
• Updated comtypes package to 1.1.3. (#7831)
• Implemented a generic system in braille.BrailleDisplayDriver to deal with displays which send confirmation/acknowledgement packets. See the handyTech braille display driver as an example. (#7590, #7721)
• A new “isAppX” variable in the config module can be used to detect if NVDA is running as a Windows Desktop Bridge Store app. (#7851)
• For document implementations such as NVDAObjects or browseMode that have a textInfo, there is now a new documentBase.documentWithTableNavigation class that can be inherited from to gain standard table navigation scripts. Please refer to this class to see which helper methods must be provided by your implementation for table navigation to work. (#7849)
• The scons batch file now better handles when Python 3 is also installed, making use of the launcher to specifically launch python 2.7 32 bit. (#7541)
• hwIo.Hid now takes an additional parameter exclusive, which defaults to True. If set to False, other applications are allowed to communicate with a device while it is connected to NVDA. (#7859)

Phew, there’s quite a bit there! Happy Easter!

NVDA 2018.1.1 Released to handle OneCore Speech changes in Win10

NV Access is today releasing a small update to NVDA 2018.1 to handle changes to the OneCore Windows speech in Windows 10.

For those running Windows Insider builds, you may have noticed recently that OneCore Windows speech voices started talking a little bit like a chipmunk. This is due to their sample rate changing in a recent Windows build. NVDA’s OneCore Windows speech support was not expecting this late-breaking change.

NVDA 2018.1.1 enhances the OneCore Windows speech support so that now any sample rate is supported, and therefore NVDA can again speak correctly with these voices.

Microsoft will be soon releasing the next stable version of Windows 10 (Redstone 4, 1803), so it is important that NVDA users on Windows 10 upgrade to NVDA 2018.1.1 in order to continue to use the OneCore Windows speech voices.

Download NVDA 2018.1.1

To find out what’s new in this release, please read What’s new in NVDA 2018.1.1.

NVDA 2018.1 Now Available for Download

NV Access is pleased to announce that version 2018.1 of NVDA, the free screen reader for Microsoft Windows, has now been released.

Highlights of this release include support for charts in Microsoft word and PowerPoint, support for new braille displays including Eurobraille and the Optelec protocol converter, improved support for Hims and Optelec braille displays, performance improvements for Mozilla Firefox 58 and higher, support for Braille Mode in Google Sheets, and much more.

This award-winning software has been changing the lives of thousands of blind and vision impaired people who can now independently use computers to produce written content, read news, socialise, shop and bank online, and, most importantly, actively participate in education and employment. Please consider helping NV Access to continue this important work by becoming a monthly donor.

Download NVDA 2018.1

To find out what’s new in this release, please read What’s new in NVDA 2018.1.