Welcome to another issue of In-Process, it’s great to have you with us once again. Those in a rush will be pleased to hear it’s not a long In-Process this week. I choose to attribute that to our winter solstice being last Wednesday. We’ll have more and more time to do newsworthy things as the days get longer from now on!
To start this week, one very popular session at this year’s NVDACon was the session by Reef and Jamie. “A discussion of how the NVDA community can make non-code contributions”. For anyone who would like to listen to the session, it is available on the NVDACon website. The direct link to the recording is https://www.nvdacon.org/2017nc
As a follow-up to that session, Reef Turner has written up some notes on how you can help triage submitted issues. Triage helps prioritise the issues that have the biggest impact on the most users. Reef has written a short piece on the process NV Access use to triage issues. For those interested in helping triage, the Triage Help page has more information.
There are a lot of exciting things “incubating” in snapshot builds currently:
- Work on Aria placeholder is now incubating in “Next” builds. Work on ARIA grids with virtual coordinates (as introduced in ARIA 1.1) has started. This is a complex addition, and will take a little time to complete.
- MathML content is now supported in Google Chrome.
- NVDA can now speak using the new Windows OneCore voices (also known as mobile voices) included in Windows 10. You access these by selecting Windows OneCore voices in NVDA’s Synthesizer dialog.
- The keyboard layout can now be set from the Welcome dialog.
- The names of landmarks are abbreviated in Braille.
Look out for all these and more in 2017.3 later this year. In the meantime, if you would like to try them out, head over to our snapshots page. Remember, these are pre-release builds and things may or may not work as advertised.
We now have over 50 NVDA Certified Experts! Congratulations to everyone who has become certified so far. All the best to those currently studying. If you’d like to get in on the action, be sure to visit the NV Access Certification System. Remember, you can now add your contact details so those wanting to find an expert can contact you!
And that’s all for this week, except to say, Happy 20th anniversary to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone! In closing then, I’ll leave you with this to think on: “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live”.