Welcome to our last blog post for the year! We’ve got a bit we wanted to leave you with over the break, starting with a very exciting announcement. What’s inside this week:
- You Can Now Sign Up via Email!
- End of Year Office Hours
- NVDA Contributor Documentation Survey Update
- Best Practices for Add-on Developers
You Can Now Sign Up via Email!
NV Access is very pleased to share that we now have an email list! We’ve been asked about it for a while, and we are pleased to confirm that we have now set up an official NV Access mailing list. You can subscribe to receive:
- Our fortnightly In-Process blog
- NV Access organisational updates
- NVDA Release announcements (stable and beta)
- Good news stories
- Job listings
To subscribe to any of the above, please go to: http://eepurl.com/iuVyjo. While this has worked smoothly for most users, there is a step to confirm you aren’t a robot. I’m not sure if we can change that, but in the meantime, if there are any robots who would like to subscribe, we don’t discriminate! If you get stuck (robot or not), please do write to us from the email address you’d like to subscribe at, and let us know which updates you’d like, and we can add you manually.
While one of the options is to subscribe to receive In-Process (this blog) via email, we are going to start that in the new year. We are just about to send out or first NV Access organisational update to our subscribers. This will recap some of the highlights this year. Importantly, however, we are keen not to inundate people, particularly at this time of year. As we have just set the mailing service up, we didn’t want to send out two emails straight after each other to those who have just subscribed.
End of Year Office Hours
It is that time of year again! Like many other organisations around the world, NV Access are winding down for the end of year break. The staff are taking leave at various times over the next few weeks.
We are then heading to the South Pacific Educators in Vision Impairment (SPEVI) conference. This will be held in Brisbane, Australia, during the week of January 13. The theme for SPEVI 2025 is: ‘EmPOWERment through connection, inclusion and education’. We look forward to catching up with new and old friends, users and industry colleagues there!
In the meantime, expect responses from NV Access to any queries or requests to be delayed. But, we wouldn’t leave you without help! Here are a few resources to keep you able to use NVDA while we take a break:
NVDA User Guide and Quick Start Guide. Available from the help menu in NVDA or online.
NV Access corporate and government page for anyone looking roll out NVDA at work.
NV Access website, particularly the “Get Help” page, which has many suggestions and links to resources.
NVDA telephone support and training material. Please note: If you’ve purchased training materials and can’t find them, you can go to the My Account, Download page and download previous purchases from there.
NVDA user’s email group. A very helpful group who are friendly and willing to help with most questions or problems (please do describe issues with as much detail as possible).
Report issues and feature requests for NVDA on the NVDA GitHub page.
For urgent queries or problems, please do email info@nvaccess.org, which will be checked periodically.
NVDA Contributor Documentation Survey Update
Thank you to everyone who took part in the recent NVDA contributor document survey. There was a lot of fantastic feedback in the survey results. We are very pleased to confirm that we either have started or were already working on many of these. Most are goals which will take some time to fully realise. I wanted to note, however, some themes which came up, which are either already being planned or actively worked on:
- Centralisation of contributor documentation, particularly into just the NVDA repository
- Improving translation guides
- Writing fully-fledged add-on API documentation
- Triage documentation
Thank you to everyone who filled in our contributor documentation survey! And thank you also to those who completed the earlier Braille survey AND the yearly NVDA Satisfaction survey this year. We very much appreciate your feedback! And of course, you don’t have to wait for a survey. If you have an idea for a feature which will improve NVDA, please create an issue on GitHub, raise it in the user group, or email us (and we’ll get back to you early in the new year).
Best Practices for Add-on Developers
In recent posts, we’ve been discussing a lot about NV Access’s approach to stability and add-on compatibility. Today, let’s focus on you: the talented individuals who create the amazing add-ons that make NVDA even more powerful and versatile. We’ll explore some best practices to help you build reliable and future-proof add-ons.
Embrace the Power of Pre-Releases
One of the most effective ways to ensure your add-on remains compatible with new NVDA versions is to test it against our pre-release builds. We regularly release alpha and beta versions of NVDA, giving you a sneak peek at upcoming changes and the opportunity to identify any potential issues early on.
Stay in the Know: Monitoring API Updates
We meticulously document any API changes in our release notes and developer documentation. We have created a dedicated API Changes announcement list which we expect all developers to join. It is very low traffic and only contains API change announcements from us. Please, as a developer, make it a habit to review these updates before each major NVDA .1 release. This will help you understand if there are any adjustments that you might need to make to your add-on’s code. And if you want to discuss any thoughts or questions with other add-on developers, remember the add-on mailing list is a fantastic resource for this.
Resources at Your Fingertips
There are several resources to help you in your add-on development journey:
Developer Guide: Our comprehensive developer guide covers everything from getting started to advanced topics like creating custom gestures and speech dictionaries.
API Changes announcement list: An announcement only list where we provide a heads up of upcoming API changes.
Developer Forum: Our active add-on developer forum is a great place to connect with other developers, ask questions, and share your knowledge.
Become an Alpha/Beta Tester: We encourage you to participate in our alpha and beta testing programs. By testing pre-release versions of NVDA and providing feedback, you’ll not only help us identify and fix bugs early on, but you’ll also gain insights into upcoming changes that may affect your add-ons. You can now sign up to receive beta release information via email if you prefer. We will also continue to announce beta / RC versions here in In-Process, and on social media and email groups.
Thanks to all our hard working, talented add-on developers! We appreciate your dedication and creativity in building amazing add-ons for NVDA. Keep up the great work!
That’s all for this edition, and for this year! We want to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their support in 2024 – whether financial, code, advocacy, helping other users or in any other way. We hope you all have a happy and safe time while we’re on leave. Enjoy Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, or just time with loved ones. Please do sign up to our email notifications, and you can read the next post right in your inbox. We look forward to an even bigger and better 2025!