We are pleased and grateful to announce that  Adobe have provided a grant to  NV Access to support NVDA development. This grant will enable us to improve support for Adobe Reader and add support for Adobe flash embedded in browsers. This is great news for NVDA users given the increasing regularity of PDF documents and Flash content. This will also help users access content and applications developed with Adobe Flex and interactive forms developed with Adobe LiveCycle.

We've already done much of the work to improve support for Adobe Reader. You can try it out for yourself in NVDA development snapshots.

NVDA has quite a few dependencies. Some of these have nice installers, but others are very small or aren't readily available in the form we need for some reason or another. Therefore, for people running from source, we previously bundled all of these dependencies into a single, convenient "miscellaneous dependencies" package. Unfortunately, this is rather tedious for us to maintain. Most of these dependencies rarely ever change, making updating the whole package for every change rather pointless. Therefore, the miscellaneous dependencies package is no more. Instead, dependencies.txt in the root of the code repository has been renamed to readme.txt and provides an in-depth description of all of the required dependencies, as well as instructions for preparing, running and building the source code. Pre-built versions of some of the dependencies are still provided where they are difficult to obtain or build, as described in the readme. Please let me know if I've missed anything!

We would like to thank the Mozilla Foundation for providing  NV Access with another grant allowing NVDA to continue and grow. Initially this grant will allow development of much more proper and complete support for ARIA live regions in NVDA. Specifically this work will firstly consist of redesigning NVDA's in-process code, making it less specific to virtual buffers and more generalized so that it will be much easier to add code for such things as live regions. I have started this work already. Secondly support for live regions will be designed within the new in-process framework so that NVDA will be able to appropriately announce changes in live regions found in web documents and applications. Examples of live regions are the message history of a chat application, a value on a score board, or even perhaps subtitles, audio description text, or captions on a video streamed over the web.