NVDA - Home

Welcome to the Home of NVDA

NVDA is a free and open source screen reader for the Microsoft Windows Operating System. This software can enable blind or vision impaired people to access computers running Windows, for no more cost than a sighted person.

NVDA allows the user to find out what is happening on the screen, by querying the Operating system and using a speech synthesizer to output the information.

Check out the Download section if you would like to get a copy and try it out.

For information about email lists, the NVDA IRC chat channel and links to community sites written in other languages, take a look at the Community section.

If you are interested in participating in the development of NVDA, either by writing code or documentation, translating NVDA to your native language, testing new code and providing detailed bug reports, or taking part in technical discussions on how NVDA can be extended and improved, please take a look at the Development section

If you're not a developer, but you still wish to help the project in some way, please considder making a Donation to NV Access.

NVDA is still very much in development. It may contain bugs and not be as stable as other commercial screen readers. However, even though it may not work correctly in every situation, people are reporting that NVDA works well for basic computing tasks, and definitly has the potential to grow in to something as usable as the commercial screen readers.

Contacting the project

To contact the developers of NVDA, please send us an email at: developers@nvda-project.org. However we do ask that before asking questions, you do take a look around the website (wiki, email list archives etc) to see if your question has already been answered.

News

General Progress Update

08 May 2008 04:44 UTC by jteh

It has been quite some time since the last general post. A great deal has happened over the past couple of months, including the CSUN conference and preparation therefor, about which I posted separately. I have thus been dreading writing this, as I struggle to remember some of the minor, but nonetheless important, happenings of the last couple of months.

nvaccess.org and nvda-project.org Moved to New Server

18 Apr 2008 00:47 UTC by jteh

As many of you can probably attest, services on nvda-project.org, including the web site and Trac, have been extremely unreliable over the past few months. There has been frequent downtime, sometimes lasting for hours at a time, and even when services were functional, they were often extremely slow. Thus, a few weeks ago, we decided that it was time to move to a new server. Rather than moving to another service hosting package, we opted for our own virtual server. While this increases the technical administration tedium that Mick and I must endure, it also allows for much greater flexibility.

CSUN 2008

21 Mar 2008 07:13 UTC by jteh

As I begin writing this, I'm sitting on a plane enduring the 13 hour flight back to Sydney from Los Angeles. As many of you know, the week prior to CSUN was insanely busy, as Mick and I hurried to make the 0.6p1 release in time for the conference. (In fact, we ended up deferring the release until soon after we arrived in the U.S.) CSUN was similarly busy, which, alongside far too little sleep, has left us exhausted. Despite a consequent need for some serious R&R, CSUN 2008 was an absolutely fantastic experience, both for NVDA and for Mick and I personally.

NVDA 0.6p1 Released!

11 Mar 2008 22:56 UTC by jteh

We have just released NVDA 0.6p1. This is a preview release, meaning that there are still major issues to be fixed before the final 0.6 release. However, this provides a preview of some of the new functionality that can be expected in 0.6. This release will be featured at CSUN 2008. For more information about the current status of releases, see this article.

NV Access at CSUN 2008

25 Feb 2008 08:45 UTC by jteh

Mick and I will be attending the Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference (better known as CSUN) commencing in approximately two weeks. Once again, this is thanks to the generosity of the Mozilla Foundation. This should be an exciting event for NVDA, as NVDA has progressed a great deal since last year's conference.

My full time work on NVDA commences…

25 Feb 2008 07:21 UTC by jteh

I began working full time for NV Access on NVDA three weeks ago (on Monday, 4 February, to be precise). This was interrupted last week, as I had to work for another week with my previous employer, so I've now been working full time on NVDA for two weeks.

Mozilla Foundation grant allows for employment of NVDA full-time developer

14 Jan 2008 12:26 UTC by mdcurran

Thanks to the generocity and support of the Mozilla Foundation NV Access has been able to hire James Teh as a full-time developer to work on NVDA. The Mozilla Foundation has taken a keen interest in NVDA as one of NVDA's goals is to provide excellent support for Mozilla products, such as Firefox and Thunderbird.

A Server for building and testing NVDA

21 Nov 2007 05:16 UTC by mdcurran

Over the last week or so, I have been busily setting up the new testing/development server that was kindly donated to NV Access. This server is going to be used as a server for the organization: hosting a virtual private network, allowing for the collaboration of business-related work and access to NVAccess's printer/copier/scanner/fax (bought through an Australian government grant). But more importantly it will be used as a testing/development server. Once its finally set up, this server will be able to automatically build daily snapshots of NVDA (if the source code changes), and also hopefully run some automated tests on the snapshots, to make sure that changes made don't break any previous changes.

NVDA at BCA Technology Expo and NVDA Summit

25 Oct 2007 09:52 UTC by jteh

Last weekend, I flew to Melbourne, Australia (I live in Brisbane) for two exciting events related to NVDA.

Project Contributers

The following people and/or organisations have contributed in some way to the NVDA project: Michael Curran, James Teh, Peter Vagner, Victor Tsaran, The Mozilla Foundation, Aleksey Sadovoy, Cleverson Casarin Uliana, Jani Kinnunen, Ali Savas, David Parduhn, Luca Maianti, Simone Dal Maso, Michel Such, Pierre Beauchamp, coscell Kao, Rui Batista, Serotek Corporation, J.J. Meddaugh, Juan C. buno, Tamás Géczy, Ângelo Miguel, Tomas Valusek, Jaromir Vit, David Picon, Enrique Varela, Halena rojas, Eric Yip, Dang Hoai Phuc, Jason Custer, Willem van der Walt, Bozenka Gogolakova, Dmitry Kaslin, DOROTA CZAJKA, Diogo Costa, Katsutoshi Tsuji, Amy Curran, Mathew Mirabella, and Jonathan Duddington.