NVDA Roadmap
This document outlines NV Access’s planned development roadmap for NVDA and its supporting infrastructure for 2026. Priorities are grouped into short, medium, and long-term time frames.
Short-Term Priorities
These priorities focus on enhancements and improvements that we aim to deliver in the near future.
- Stability: General stability fixes to address long-standing freezes and crashes.
- Security: Continuing to address high / critical impact security issues as they arise.
- Magnifier: Launching the initial version of a built-in screen magnification feature to better support low-vision users, alongside specific UX improvements for mouse users.
- Reducing testing friction: A suite of changes designed to encourage community beta testing, including improving issue reporting documentation that is more easily accessible from within NVDA.
- Add-on store infrastructure: Improving performance and maintainability.
- Braille improvements: Focusing on braille stability and general improvements for single-line displays.
- Import / Export functionality: Allowing easy transfer of configuration / user data between copies of NVDA.
- Installer: Redesign of the launcher and installer to make use of more secure and standard Windows installation technologies such as MSIX.
Medium-Term Priorities
These priorities represent more significant features and improvements that require more extensive development effort, or that we aim to deliver after our short-term priorities.
- Magnifier enhancements: Iterating on the magnifier feature to include advanced cursor tracking and bug fixes.
- Corporate mode: Compatibility and security settings to assist the deployment and maintenance of NVDA in enterprise environments.
- Secure add-on runtime: A runtime execution environment, separate from NVDA, that allows untrusted add-ons to run with limited access to the user’s computer. The first version of the runtime will provide support for speech synthesis and braille devices, with more capabilities being added over time.
- OCR improvements: Updates to on-device OCR capabilities, including allowing users to choose specific OCR models.
- Microsoft Office UIA: Expanding UIA support beyond Excel to include other Office components, specifically scoping improvements for PowerPoint and Word.
- Remote access E2E encryption: Implementation of End-to-End (E2E) encryption for NVDA Remote.
- Analytics architecture: Rebuilding our internal analytics collection system for scalability and cost efficiency, and implementing an add-on analytics pipeline to understand add-on usage patterns.
- ARIA compliance: The annual push to maintain NVDA’s adherence to modern ARIA standards.
- Excel UIA support: Continuing to improve UI Automation support in Microsoft Excel for better performance and stability.
Long-Term Priorities
These priorities represent ambitious goals and initiatives that will shape the future of NVDA, or that we aim to deliver after our medium-term priorities.
- Educational outreach: Launching “Programming 101,” a curated learning portal to help blind/VI students transition from NVDA users to developers.
- On-device image description: Private, low latency image description running locally on the user’s computer. This is intended to complement the existing image description capabilities of add-ons for massive, cloud-only description models. On-device description provides short text descriptions (e.g. “a man holding a hat”) without any data leaving the user’s computer.
- Chinese word segmentation: Improved word segmentation capabilities for Chinese language texts.
- Feature usage statistics: Anonymously tracking specific feature usage within NVDA to identify settings that are no-longer used.
- Braille font attributes: Utilising multi-line braille to intuitively communicate font attributes of text.
- Video call readiness: Audio cues on framing, lighting and obstructions for video calls.
- UI element recognition: Leveraging machine learning to identify and interpret inaccessible UI elements.
Contributing and Feedback
We encourage contributions from the community!
Please explore NVDA’s GitHub repository or user groups to learn more about how you can get involved.