What a busy few weeks we’ve had! Let’s get into it:
Australian Story
Did you catch our founders Mick and Jamie on Australian Story? What an amazing show it was! Australian Story is a half-hour documentary style TV program. It goes behind the scenes to cover the people who do extra-ordinary things, and make amazing contributions to society. The episode about Mick and Jamie is available to view now for anyone around the world:
On ABC iView and ABC News in Australia.
On YouTube with Audio Description (anywhere in the world).
And without audio description.
Speaking of behind the scenes, here are a couple of photos, courtesy of the ABC, from filming of the episode:
Six photos of Jamie from filming:
Jamie smiling,
Jamie from behind with crew and equipment visible,
Jamie looking thoughtful,
Jamie laughing, hands behind head and boom in shot,
Jamie laughing, and Jamie smiling
Ki from Dot Inc, with James Boreham, Mick and Jamie as Mick articulates a point about the Dot Pad on the table in front of him.
QCF Philanthropy Award
On Friday, the Queensland Community Foundation philanthropy awards were presented. This was the culmination of a week celebrating philanthropy. Mick, Jamie and James attended the lunch at Brisbane City Hall. They were honoured with the Queensland Community Foundation Philanthropy Innovation award. The fact that NVDA was conceived from the outset to be free, and open-source, and backed by a charity, was, and still is, a revolutionary and innovative approach to software. Accolades like these are a testament to your belief in the vision of NV Access as much as any individual contribution. Thank you to all our supporters, for making the dream of a free, open-source, charity-backed screen reader a success! Support isn’t only financial. It can be code, helping other users or spreading the word, your contribution is valuable, so thank you!
James Boreham, Jamie Teh, Mick Curran & Kristin Devitt at the QCF awards lunch.
New donors
While we are thanking our supporters, we do have a special shout out to our donors. We have had a number of new donors recently, which is fantastic, thank you! Donations are an important source of income for us. This enable us to continue our mission to ensure everyone around the world can access a free, high-quality screen reader. Importantly, creating a screen reader like NVDA is an ongoing process. Windows is continually evolving. We need to ensure that NVDA continues to work with the latest features.
Thank you especially to @anomaly, Day Garwood, and Jo Wheaton! Your support means a lot to us!
If you would like to donate, you can find all the information on our Donation page.
Add-on Store in Alpha
The much awaited Add-on Store was merged to the main NVDA branch and released via NVDA alpha last week. This means it is staged for the release of NVDA 2023.2. The Add-on Store will replace add-on manager.
This feature is still in alpha – meaning there are few known issues remaining and community alpha testing is ongoing.
However, this merge is a major milestone of the project.
Now that it has been merged, it has also enabled the community to easily contribute to further Add-on Store development.
The pull request to NVDA was developed over 2 years and over 4000 lines of code.
This work was part of a series of related Addon Store projects: migrating and creating server infrastructure and a submission process for add-ons.
This required well over 10,000 lines of code across several project repositories.
There have been significant community contributions for all of these projects, including testing, giving feedback, and code contributions.
We now have a fully automated process, which allows add-on authors to submit add-ons and have them available in the Add-on Store for a user to install or update to within NVDA.
If you would like to try out the add-on store, you can download the latest alpha from our “Snapshots” page.
Please note that you need to use an installed or portable copy of NVDA to access the Add-on Store. You cannot access it from the temporary copy which loads when you run the downloaded launcher.
That’s all for this week, we’ll be back around the end of the month!