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!