We are now using 7-Zip self-extracting archives instead of zip archives; i.e. for portable NVDA snapshots and the NVDA Miscellaneous Dependencies package. 7-Zip archives provide better compression than zip archives and thus facilitate smaller file sizes. Also, self-extracting archives are more convenient for some users. If you want to perform operations other than extracting the entire archive, you can open these archives using 7-Zip.

A new version of the NVDA Miscellaneous Dependencies package has been released. This version rearranges some files, which was necessary to fix #122.

This will be included in NVDA snapshots from r2161.

Users running from source must update to this new version if running r2160 or later.

A new version of the NVDA Miscellaneous Dependencies package has been released. This includes a new version of the virtual buffer library containing changes necessary for the implementation of the new quick navigation keys outlined in ticket #102. It also introduces a change to allow quick navigation and links list to detect some elements which were previously skipped.

This will be included in NVDA snapshots from r2149.

Users running from source must update to this new version if running r2149 or later.

A new version of the NVDA Miscellaneous Dependencies package has been released. This includes a new version of the virtual buffer library. It also includes mfc71.dll, which is required to compile NVDA into an executable and is missing on many systems.

Noteworthy changes in the new version of the virtual buffer library include:

• Don't render unlabelled, non-interactive (i.e. not linked or clickable) graphics. This removes a lot of unnecessary clutter from many pages.
• Fix a bug where text would eventually mysteriously disappear for virtual buffers for dynamic sites such as GMail and PennyTel?.
• Eliminate extraneous whitespace in several circumstances.
• Treat sections, separators, tables, iframes and unknown objects as block elements. This means that these elements will never be rendered on the same line as another element.
• Ignore unlabelled graphics inside links if the graphic is not the link's only content and is not clickable.
• Filter the URL for links with no content in the same way that URLs for graphic links are filtered. Implements #104.
• Improvements to the method used to avoid rendering invisible elements.
• Other minor optimisations and fixes.

This will be included in NVDA snapshots from r2138.

I am happy to announce that we have just launched the new NVDA web site on which we have been working for the past couple of weeks. This new site is based entirely on Trac and integrates all of our web services, including general information pages, downloads, wiki, issue tracker and blog. This allows for seemless referencing and interaction between services, greater community collaboration and ease of maintenance, among other benefits.

Note that www.nvda-project.org is the preferred address for this new site. trac.nvda-project.org redirects to this address.

Feedback is very much welcome.