General Progress Update

As usual, a great deal has happened in the last few months. Perhaps the most exciting happening for NVDA users was the release of NVDA 0.6p2, which we believe is a major step forward in stability and functionality for NVDA. As such, NVDA 0.6p2 is now the recommended release for most users. The old stable release, NVDA 0.5, is no longer recommended. This release followed the NVDA hack fest in June, which, as well as a lot of other important discussion, was when the decision to make this release was made.

Many people have asked how many times NVDA has been downloaded. We were obviously quite curious about this ourselves, but we never had a reliable way to count downloads, so we had no idea. Thus, just prior to the release of 0.6p2, I set up a download counter for NVDA releases. We were quite pleasantly astonished by the results. At the time of this writing, since 0.6p2 was released on 7 August, it has been downloaded 3640 times. On average, that's around 1000 downloads per week! It should be noted that this includes downloads of both the installer and the portable release and many users probably download both. The increase is obviously slowing now that the release has been available for a few weeks, but we were still pretty impressed. We honestly had no idea that the count would be this high. Thanks to all who have downloaded! :) The counter also tracks other information such as the country and browser of downloaders, but I haven't generated any statistics for those details yet.

After the release, I spent some time preparing for a presentation on NVDA for  Info Vision 08. Info Vision 08 was an exhibition on assistive technology for the blind, visually impaired, deafblind and hearing and visually impaired held at the 7th General Assembly for the World Blind Union in Switzerland. The presentation, which I gave via Skype on 21 August, was quite successful, attracting a decent amount of interest. We will hopefully be able to make a recording available for download some time soon.

In terms of NVDA development, Mick and I have been working on several noteworthy changes to NVDA. We have been doing a lot of this work in different branches of the code, which enables us to make changes which may severely break some functionality without worrying about breaking the main code base used by users. The first of these involved changes to NVDA's audio output code, used primarily by the in-built eSpeak synthesiser. Aside from minor performance and stability improvements, these changes mean that if NVDA is set to use the default Windows output device, it will switch to the new default device if the default device changes. For example, NVDA can switch to a USB audio device automatically when it is connected. Also, the last chunk of audio is no longer cut off when using NVDA with eSpeak on a remote desktop server. This branch was merged into the main code base not long after 0.6p2 was released.

In another branch, we are developing support for multiple input desktops. This will allow NVDA to read secure screens such as the Windows logon screen, the Windows security screen and the UAC (user account control) dialogs in Windows Vista. This must be done quite differently for Windows XP and Vista, but we are working on solutions for both operating systems. So far, the work is looking quite promising and has already received positive feedback from some testers, but is not yet ready for most users.

In the past few weeks, Mick embarked on a major restructure of NVDA's document formatting code. While most of these changes are not particularly noticeable to the user, they will allow for simpler, more elegant additions to formatting support in future, including the ability to support it in virtual buffers. Also, formatting can now be queried and reported automatically in IAccessible2 text controls, including spelling errors in Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird. This code was merged into the main code base a couple of days ago. Mick is now working on the virtual buffer library and will eventually implement support for formatting, which will complete the work for the Mozilla web access grant.

NVDA's virtual buffer pass through mode, which is equivalent to forms mode or similar in other screen readers, is a point of some controversy for many users. Users must enable virtual buffer pass through when they wish to interact directly with a control and then disable it to resume browsing the document. In terms of useability, one of the reasons for these dual modes of operation relates to quick navigation keys. A user needs to be able to disable the single letter quick navigation keys to type properly into a control. Also, the screen reader needs to have a way to determine when the cursor keys should move the real cursor in a form field and when they should move the virtual cursor. However, screen readers such as Orca and Serotek System Access have used a single mode of operation right from the start. Increasing requests from our users, followed by the introduction of auto forms mode in the recently released JAWS 10 public beta, motivated us to further investigate and work on this feature in NVDA in order to bring it in line with the majority of modern screen readers. Thus, I have been working on automatic virtual buffer pass through over the last couple of weeks. Again, the work is promising, but not yet complete.

Outside of NVDA, there has been some other noteworthy news over the past few months. 17 June saw the official release of  Mozilla Firefox 3.0. This was an exciting release for NVDA users, as Firefox 3 includes some major accessibility enhancements which NVDA requires to provide its excellent access to Firefox. Also, the  WebVisum Firefox extension was  announced in July. WebVisum is a free accessibility extension which sports features such as community driven tagging and page enhancements, automated CAPTCHA solving (yay!), helper functions for easier page navigation, and numerous under the hood page tweaks designed to help screen reader users. Its user community is growing rapidly, and it of course works very well with NVDA! :) Marco Zehe wrote  an excellent review of WebVisum.