March 8, 2025 6:51 pm

Hi everyone, and welcome to an early In-Process! We’re busy packing and getting ready for CSUN next week so we wanted to put out In-Process this week to keep you going until we’re back from the USA! This time around:

1. CSUN 2025
2. NVDA 2025.1
3. Harun: Fast and Local in Türkiye
4. Thanks to Airbnb
5. New Donor Badge
6. Speech and Braille Viewers

CSUN 2025

The 40th annual CSUN Assistive Technology Conference is on March 10 – 14 in Anaheim, California. We are looking forward to seeing friends, industry colleagues, users, new technology and more over the next week! We’ll be sure to bring you news and pictures from the event.

We have uploaded our presentation to the official CVENT app. We have also created our own CSUN page here which includes extra detail, links and information.

NVDA 2025.1

A quick note to let you know that the NVDA 2025.1 Beta will be out soon, but not before CSUN. We didn’t want to try to rush it right before the event and when much of the team would be away for the week. More new features have made their way to alpha builds this week. So, if you would like to try out a pre-release version to see what is coming, they are available. Be aware that these are NOT recommended for most users, and we do not make any guarantees about them. Do ensure you have a copy of NVDA 2024.4.2 handy if you do try the alpha. And of course, do please report any issues you find on GitHub.

Harun: Fast and Local in Türkiye

This week, we bring you a testimonial from Harun, one of our enthusiastic users in Türkiye. Harun has been an NVDA user for a number of years. He really appreciates how fast and portable NVDA is. NVDA is also localised in Turkish, and well over 50 other languages too.

You can read Harun’s story here. We also created a video to go with it, using NVDA to read the text out. We have done this before, but not often, and we’re curious what you think? Of course, where we have a recorded interview with someone, we will use that. But where we don’t – do you like having the YouTube video, or would you rather simply read the text? (Even with the video, we will still include the text, as we have in this case).

Thanks to Airbnb

This time around, we’d like to give a big shoutout to Airbnb. In February 2025, NV Access were awarded an Airbnb Community Fund grant. The Airbnb Community Fund will distribute $100 million to communities by the end of 2030, and in 2025, the Fund’s fifth year, over 160 organizations across 30+countries will receive donations totaling more than $8.5 million USD. As in previous years, hosts helped direct a majority of the donations to organizations supporting and strengthening communities around the world, including NV Access!

Thank you Airbnb and the #AirbnbCommunityFund!

And while we’re thanking corporate sponsors, we would also like to thank Code Rabbit. Code Rabbit generously sponsor us on GitHub. GitHub sponsorship is one option for those looking to support our work. You can also donate directly, or via your employer through Benevity.

New Donor Badge

Whichever way you donate to NVDA, if you’d like to share your support with others to encourage them to donate as well, you can! We have updated our donor badge for 2025! The donor badge was a suggestion from CSUN back in 2023 and has been a huge hit ever since. Do collect your badge today – and we look forward to collecting new suggestions shortly at CSUN 2025!

Speech Viewer

NVDA’s speech viewer is a very handy tool for sighted users. A tutor can follow along with an NVDA user, testers, or those wanting to copy what NVDA speaks can also make use of it. You can turn on the Speech viewer in NVDA’s tools menu:

1. Press NVDA+n to open the NVDA menu
2. Press “t” for tools
3. Press “s” for Speech Viewer

The Speech Viewer appears on screen, and over the top of other windows so it will stay visible. Press NVDA+n, t, s to turn the speech viewer off again. The Window is listed as the last window in the alt+tab list, so you can also press alt+shift+tab to get to it. By navigating to the Speech Viewer window, you can select and copy text if needed. You can also press tab to a “Show speech viewer on startup” checkbox. When enabled, it will show the speech viewer when NVDA starts. This saves needing to start it manually each time.

Similarly, NVDA has a Braille Viewer. This is handy for checking the output of Braille as this can be different to the speech output. Press NVDA+n, then t, then b. The Braille viewer is very similar to the Speech Viewer. Visually the Braille viewer only shows one line and is wider. It presents the line in a visual representation of Braille, above the printed text. There is a checkbox to Show Braille Viewer on Startup, which works the same as for the speech viewer. There is also an option to Hover for cell routing. When enabled, hovering the mouse over a braille cell will enable trigger the “route to braille cell” command for that cell. This is often used to move the caret or trigger the action for a control. This can be useful for testing NVDA is able to correctly reverse map a from braille cell. To prevent unintentionally routing to cells, the command is delayed. The mouse must hover until the cell turns green. The cell will start as a light yellow colour, transition to orange, then suddenly become green.

That’s all for this week. Please do come and see us if you will be at CSUN, and we look forward to bringing you more news when we are back!