We have a HUGE edition for you today with lots of information, so let’s dive in:
- Open-Source Promotion Plan
- NVDA 2025.1 Beta 6
- Timings for the .1 Release
- NVDA Remote Access
- Other “Remote” add-ons
Open-Source Promotion Plan
We’re thrilled to announce our participation in the Open-Source Promotion Plan (OSPP) for 2025! This is a wonderful initiative that brings together talented individuals to contribute to impactful open-source projects. NV Access, in partnership with our Chinese community, is delighted to take part in it. This year, we have three projects accepted into OSPP 2025. These are aimed at making real-world improvements for our users, focusing on:
- On-device AI-based image description
- Integrating Chinese word segmentation into NVDA for enhanced text navigation and braille output
- On-device OCR engine enhancement
We’re particularly excited to be working closely with the Chinese NVDA developer community on this initiative. Their enthusiasm and support have been absolutely fantastic, and we’re incredibly grateful for their partnership in making these projects a success. On this Global Accessibility Awareness Day, it also highlights the global nature of NVDA. Not only does NVDA make a difference around the world, but it helps enable people around the world to empower themselves and bring forth the contributions they want to see.
For those of you interested in participating in these projects, or want to learn more about NV Access’s involvement in OSPP 2025, you can find all the details on the official OSPP page.
NVDA 2025.1 Beta 6
This week we released another beta of NVDA 2025.1. We’re now up to beta 6. If you signed up for email notification of new betas you should have received an email earlier this week with details. If you had the previous beta installed, you would likely have been prompted to update. In any case, we’ve got all the details here!
Firstly, you can download the latest beta from the release announcement: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2025-1beta6/
What’s new?
In Beta 6, we added:
- Updates to translations
- Fix for the COM registration fixing tool: don’t run when cancelling with
alt+f4 - Minor fix for SAPI 4 voices
- Fix for Braille display detection
- Minor improvements to the user experience of Remote Access
And last week in Beta 5, we added:
- Updates to translations
- Fixes for reading math attributes in PDFs
- Minor improvements to the user experience of Remote Access
And since we were only up to beta 3 last time the blog came out, let’s catch you up on what was new in Beta 4 as well:
- Updates to translations
- Fix security issue which allowed an arbitrary process to connect to a Remote Access session running on a secure screen
- Allow Remote Access controlling computers to regain control after the last controlled computer has disconnected
- Improve focus handling in the Remote Access Connection dialog
- Don’t toggle Remote Access mute when not connected
Timings for the .1 Release
We get a lot of questions about when various things happen for releases. Here is a quick rundown, specifically for .1 releases:
- We announce API changes throughout the year for the NEXT .1 release. We expect Add-on authors to follow the announcements. Where a change can be made early, we encourage add-on authors to make changes as early as possible.
- The first beta of the .1 release comes out once we have incorporated all of the planned API breaking changes. We encourage Add-on authors to incorporate the announced API changes and release dev or beta versions of their add-ons which are marked as compatible for testing at this point. We encourage anyone interested to test out the beta and alert us to any problems via a GitHub issue.
- When the last PLANNED beta comes out, we also announce the “Translatable string freeze”. This means we do not intend to change any of the strings or text translators need to localise. So, we have a two-week period, in which translators are encouraged to finalise updating their languages. These will be included in the next release, the Release Candidate (RC).
- Two weeks after the translatable string freeze, we make the first Release Candidate (RC). This incorporates updated translations which have been submitted. At this point we encourage all users to try out the RC and alert us to any issues as soon as possible. With the release of RC1, we also encourage add-on developers to finalise any changes from testing of their beta or dev versions, start making their add-ons as compatible with this version and submit the stable update to the add-on store.
- If any issues are found, additional RC releases may be released to address minor issues. If translations need to be changed, we may enter a new string freeze. Similarly, if any API changes are required we will work closely with the add-on community to address these.
- One to two weeks after the last Release Candidate (RC) build, we release the final, stable release. We update the version available on the main download page, and we encourage all stable users to update.
- One week after the stable version is released, the first beta of the next version will come out (except where the next version is a .1 release). The above timings also work for non .1 releases. The main difference is for add-ons which are compatible through that year’s releases (Add-on compatible with NVDA 2024.1 are compatible through NVDA 2024.4, but will need to be updated to declare compatibility with NVDA 2025.1, for instance).
- The feature is disabled by default. You need to specifically go into settings to enable it before it can be used
- Once enabled, both parties need to enter the same connection details (server hostname or IP)
- Both parties need to agree on and enter a connection key
- The feature cannot be initiated when NVDA is running in secure mode, unless you have previously configured it to reconnect to a specific, known connection
NVDA Remote Access
One of the biggest features in NVDA 2025.1 is the inclusion of NVDA Remote Access – but what IS it and what can you use it for?
From the 2025.1 user guide:
“With NVDA’s built-in remote access feature, you can control another computer running NVDA or allow someone to control your computer. This makes it easy to provide or receive assistance, collaborate, or access your own computer remotely.”
Way back in 2015, NVDA Contributors Tyler Spivy and Christopher Toth successfully crowdfunded the initial development of NVDA Remote, an add-on which allowed you to control another computer running NVDA. Over the past ten years, this add-on has been extremely popular. We are very pleased to share that, in collaboration with the original developers, and the wider community, we have brought this functionality into NVDA itself. Essentially, you will no longer need the add-on to connect to another PC with NVDA running.
Users of the add-on will find that while the user interface is slightly different, the broad functionality is very similar. The new feature is also compatible if connecting to a PC running an older version of NVDA with the add-on.
We appreciate that not everyone will use this feature and many of our users, both corporate and private, will be very keen to ensure no-one has access to their machine without their knowledge. There are a number of safeguards in place to ensure your security:
We regularly work with organisations to help answer any questions they have about security or functionality as they roll out NVDA. If your organisation has any queries, please do get in touch.
All the feedback we’ve had is that this is a very exciting addition which many users have looked forward to. It also highlights the important part 3rd party add-ons play in the NVDA ecosystem. Add-ons provide a lot of extensible functionality to NVDA.
Other “Remote” add-ons
While we’re looking at “remote” and add-ons, there are two more worth mentioning:
“Tele NVDA Remote Assistance” by Asociación Comunidad Hispanohablante de NVDA. This is a variant of the original NVDA Remote add-on which provides additional functionality. It is compatible with another PC running either the built-in NVDA Remote functionality or the older NVDA Remote add-on. We know there are users who had hoped we might bring some of the custom functionality of Tele NVDA into the built-in NVDA Remote. While our original implementation is based on the regular NVDA Remote, we will of course, continue to consider ideas for building upon this, so please do continue to submit feature requests.
“Remote Desktop Accessibility” by Leonard de Ruijter. Although the name is similar, this is a completely different add-on which provides quite different functionality. From the description of that add-on: “Allows using speech and braille with Microsoft Remote Desktop, Citrix Workspace and VMware Horizon”. This add-on has been very popular with our corporate users who rely on this functionality. This is still available in the add-on store for those users.
Both of these add-ons have a “Beta” version on the NVDA add-on store which declares compatibility with NVDA 2025.1. We anticipate stable versions of each by around the time NVDA 2025.1 itself is released.
Do you use NVDA Remote (or the other “remote” related add-ons mentioned)? Join in the conversation on social media and share how it helps you!
That’s all for this week. We’ll be back around the end of the month with more, including a behind the scenes look at the NV Access 2025 strategy session!