NVDA at BCA Technology Expo and NVDA Summit

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

On Friday, Mick, Amy, Matt and I attended the Blind Citizens Australia Technology Expo held prior to the BCA national convention, where we staffed a booth for NV Access. Mick and I were providing one on one demonstrations of NVDA under both Windows XP and Vista. We were a bit concerned about the lack of interest for the first hour and a half or so, but after that, things started to heat up. People from widely varying backgrounds and degrees of computing experience visited the booth. We made between six and eight demonstrations (I can't remember the exact number), some of which were quite detailed. Between 15 and 20 people provided us with contact details, requesting further information. We also spoke to several people who were interested in passing the word about NVDA to larger numbers of people through various channels. Everyone was quite impressed by the project and most were somewhat astonished by its $0 price tag. :) Overall, it was a valuable, worthwhile experience. The interest we attracted was somewhat heartening. I think Mick and I learnt a lot about presenting the project to prospective users and other interested parties. We had also underestimated the potential for networking with people who can help further spread the word.

All of Saturday and Sunday morning was devoted to what we are calling an "NVDA Summit" or hack fest. Mick and I sat in his lounge room discussing, coding, living and breathing NVDA... as well as eating Amy's yummy, home-made cookies, among other delicious morsels. (Thanks Amy!) We covered quite a lot of ground, answering all but one of the items on our agenda. The agenda and outcomes are outlined here. Aside from this agenda and discussion of the direction of NVDA in general, the time allowed us to revitalise our working relationship and zeal for the project. It also enabled me to familiarise myself with complex parts of the code which I haven't had a chance to examine in detail due to being somewhat busy with other things of late.

The benefits of this "summit" are already being realised. This week, we have made major leaps forward with regard to the way we read dialogs. Rather than reading the entire dialog or only the dialog title and the current control, we attempt to read the descriptive text or query and then the focused control. This makes for a much nicer user experience when using most dialogs. Also, we have found and squashed a major memory leak which has been plaguing us for a while now. We have improved the speed and accuracy of cursor keys and backspace and delete, although backspace and delete still need some work.

These two events were made possible by many generous donations to NV Access. Many thanks to everyone who has donated.