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NVDA 2019.3beta2 now available for testing

Beta2 of NVDA 2019.3 is now available for download and testing. For anyone who is interested in trying out what NVDA 2019.3 has to offer before it is officially released, we welcome you to download the beta and provide feedback.

Changes from beta1:

  • The new Windows console support using UI Automation is no longer used by default as it is not yet ready for production use. However, it is still available from NVDA’s advance settings panel. (#10684)
  • NVDA no longer freezes in the new version of Microsoft Edge that is based on Chromium. (#10675)
  • A short sound is now optionally played when screen curtain is turned on or off. (#10611)
  • Fixed an issue when upgrading configuration from recent alpha builds. (#10598)
  • Fixed an issue when navigating lists with table navigation commands. (#10623)

NVDA 2019.3 is a very significant release as there are a great deal of under-the-hood changes which improve security and allow for some pretty cool innovations in the future. The most significant changes are the upgrade of Python 2 to Python 3, and a major re-write of NVDA’s speech subsystem.

As these changes require add-ons and custom synthesizer drivers to be re-written, we plan to make the 2019.3 beta cycle much longer than normal, so that we can ensure that add-on developers have plenty of time to upgrade and test their add-ons with NVDA 2019.3 betas before 2019.3 stable is officially released. the current plan is to release several more betas over this month, and hopefully make the official release very early in the new year.

Other than the move to Python 3 and the speech subsystem rewrite, there are many other new features and bug fixes. We recommend you read the what’s new document to find out all of them. However, some highlights are: Java Access Bridge is now included (providing access to 64 bit Java VMs), New Screen Curtain and Focus Highlight features are now included in NVDA, support for more braille displays and a new Braille Viewer, improvements on the web, and much more.

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