Following the release of NVDA 0.6p3,  Marco Zehe posted  an excellent article about NVDA 0.6p3 with Mozilla products.

This release provides a quick fix for those who could not start NVDA after installing NVDA 0.6p3 with the installer. In these rare cases, the NVDA start sound would be played, but NVDA would immediately exit with a critical error. If you did not experience this problem, you probably don't need to update. There is also another minor fix for those running NVDA using an 8.3 file path, which will again not affect most users.

Download links and change log:

• NVDA 0.6p3.1 installer
• NVDA 0.6p3.1 portable version
• What's new in 0.6p3.1

NVDA 0.6p3 has just been released. Unfortunately, it is almost two months later than the original release estimate, as we encountered some major problems which we felt needed to be fixed before the release. We also took the opportunity to update the user guide and provide several minor fixes.

Highlights of this release include:

• Support for braille displays! NVDA can now display both contracted and uncontracted braille on supported braille displays, and includes support for displaying the cursor and cursor routing.
• Many users found the term "virtual buffer pass through" confusing. Therefore, instead of virtual buffer pass through on and off, NVDA now reports focus mode (pass through on) and browse mode (pass through off).
• In virtual buffers, when the focus changes or the caret is moved, NVDA can automatically switch to focus mode or browse mode as appropriate for the control under the caret. For example, if a page automatically moves to an interactive control or a user tabs to or clicks an interactive control with the mouse, focus mode can automatically be enabled. This is configured from the Virtual Buffers dialog.
• Rewritten SAPI4 synthesizer driver which replaces the sapi4serotek and sapi4activeVoice drivers and should fix the problems encountered with these drivers.
• The configuration file and speech dictionaries are now saved in the user's application data directory if NVDA was installed using the installer. This is necessary for Windows Vista and also allows multiple users to have individual NVDA configurations.
• NVDA can now read text past 65535 characters in standard edit controls (e.g. a large file in Notepad).
• NVDA no longer sometimes freezes completely when editing text in OpenOffice.

Please read What's New in NVDA 0.6p3 for a more detailed list of changes.

Please note that this is a preview release, meaning that there are still some issues to be fixed before the next stable release. For more information about the current status of releases, see this article. Nevertheless, this release is recommended for most users. The old stable release, 0.5, is no longer recommended.

Download links and change log:

• NVDA 0.6p3 installer
• NVDA 0.6p3 portable version
• What's new in 0.6p3

Some of you might have noticed that recently, the NVDA and NV Access web sites have been hideously slow and unreliable at certain peak times. Pages often took a very long time to load, and sometimes even failed to load at all, simply throwing up a nasty error. Our server was struggling (and failing) to cope with the traffic it was receiving. While this is exciting in one sense (we're obviously getting quite a lot of hits!), it was obviously a rather large problem. Therefore, I've spent quite a few hours optimising it and made some rather substantial changes to its configuration. It took me quite a few tries to get everything working correctly, so the site has been in various states of functionality over the last day or so. Everything should be working now and the server does seem to be running much better than it was before. Please let me know if there are any further problems. Our apologies for the downtime.