NVDA is now available on public access computers in public libraries right across New Zealand!

Last year, after discovering that NVDA was being blocked from running from a USB drive on public access computers at his local library in Stratford, Gene Gibson contacted  The Aotearoa People's Network, who provide and manage public internet access for public libraries across the country, to request that NVDA be allowed to run. They happily obliged, first for the Stratford district library and later for all libraries served by the APN. In addition, the APN are currently rolling out a software upgrade to all of their computers which includes the latest version of NVDA. Gene has also been instrumental in getting free magnification software installed on APN computers. This is fantastic news for blind and vision impaired New Zealanders! See our Recognition page for press articles and other links.

We'd like to extend our thanks to Gene for his great advocacy and support of the NVDA project.

I'm still working on my CSUN 2009 report as I find the time. It's coming. Really. :) In the meantime, I've posted the slides for our NVDA presentation. We used  S5 for these slides. If you want to see all of the slides in a handout format, press the letter t. (NVDA users will need to pass this key through to the browser by first pressing NVDA+f2.)

Last September, Mick started completely refactoring our virtual buffer library, a task which ended up becoming almost a complete redesign. This new library is called nvVBufLib. Over the last few months, he has been working on porting the Mozilla Gecko back-end to the new library. We encountered a few major hiccups along the way, which have now thankfully been solved.

Meanwhile, a few weeks ago, I decided to try my hand at implementing a new Adobe Acrobat/Reader back-end for this new library. In addition, Mick recently started implementing a back-end for Microsoft Internet Explorer. This means that support for Adobe Reader and Internet Explorer is now unified with the same core code used for Mozilla Gecko, which means that features such as fast page rendering, extensive quick navigation, links list, text selection, auto focus mode and braille support are now available with these documents.

I'm happy to announce that I've just merged all of this code into the main code base, which means it will also be available in binary snapshots. This is obviously very exciting! However, while the new code appears to be relatively stable, there may still be serious bugs which need to be resolved. Also note that the Internet Explorer support is still not yet complete; form fields may not appear, some controls may not be rendered, there may be problems with frames and the buffer is not updated dynamically, just to list a few of the big issues. Having said this, if you're willing to live on the bleeding edge, please do test and shoot us your feedback! Those of you who aren't willing to deal with problems should probably avoid snapshots for a while until things settle down.

Enjoy!

This release includes an updated Polish translation which was meant to be included in 0.6p3 but missed out by a few days. It also includes a fix for an issue where some documents would not load at all in Adobe Reader. However, note that support for Adobe Reader in this release is still very rudimentary at best.

Download links and change log:

• NVDA 0.6p3.2 installer
• NVDA 0.6p3.2 portable version
• What's new in 0.6p3.2

As noted previously, we will be attending  CSUN 2009, which is now less than two weeks away. We are presenting on NVDA and will also feature in two other presentations. We've posted our plans for the conference, including details of these presentations and our schedule. IF you're interested in meeting, drop us an email.