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.

Perhaps the most exciting recent development is the new in-process virtual buffer back-end for Mozilla Gecko 1.9, which is used by Firefox 3 and Thunderbird 3. In practical terms, this means that rendering pages into a virtual buffer in these programs is now practically instantaneous and is far more accurate than the previous code. Although it is not quite yet as stable as we would like, it is almost ready for public testing. We're very keen to show this off at the conference! :) We are also working to address several other items in NVDA prior to CSUN.

Please see CSUN 2008 Plans for more information, including our "to do" list and a rough schedule. If any of you are interested in joining or collaborating with the NVDA project in some way and want to meet at CSUN, please drop Mick and I an email.

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.

It has certainly been a busy but interesting two weeks. I am obviously quite familiar with the project, given that I have been a core developer almost since the beginning. However, working on a project full time is unsurprisingly somewhat different to casual contribution in one's spare time. Nevertheless, I am very much enjoying the work and am looking forward to realising exciting potential for NVDA as the year progresses.

Mick and I are currently focusing on preparing both ourselves and NVDA for the upcoming  Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference, better known as CSUN. I will post more on this later. I have spent most of my time so far discussing all things NVDA with Mick, fixing small (but nevertheless annoying and problematic) bugs, and helping Mick to test the new virtual buffer code.

I would like to once again extend my personal thanks to the  Mozilla Foundation for making this possible. I am extremely grateful for and excited about the opportunity to devote all of my working hours to further develop NVDA.