We have received countless requests from users wanting to use the ETI-Eloquence or IBM ViaVoice TTS speech synthesisers with NVDA. Unfortunately, it is generally not legal to use either of these synthesisers with NVDA. This article explains the situation. Please read this article in full before posting any questions about either synthesiser. Discussion about illegal use of either synthesiser on the NVDA mailing lists will not be tolerated.

What are ETI-Eloquence and IBM ViaVoice TTS?

 ETI-Eloquence is a small footprint, multi-lingual speech synthesiser which is extremely popular among blind and vision impaired people and is used in many popular desktop and mobile screen readers.  IBM ViaVoice TTS is another product which incorporates the ETI-Eloquence speech synthesis technology .

Licensing

ETI-Eloquence is now owned by  Nuance Communications. It is not (and has never been) a free product, even despite the fact that its development has been discontinued by Nuance. Similarly, IBM ViaVoice TTS is distributed by  Wizzard Software and is also not a free product.

Both synthesisers are licensed to application developers for use in their applications. Unfortunately, unlike many synthesisers on the market, it is not currently possible to purchase individual licenses that aren't tied to specific products for either of these synthesisers.

Certain products, such as IBM Home Page Reader and GW Micro Window-Eyes before version 7, included a SAPI 4 version of ETI-Eloquence or IBM ViaVoice. This synthesiser could be used with NVDA via its SAPI 4 driver. However, even though there is no restriction on the actual software, it is highly likely that the license does not actually permit the synthesiser to be used with products other than the one with which it is bundled. The license certainly does not permit free redistribution of the synthesiser.

Confirmation of Licensing

In 2006, NVDA did include a driver for IBM ViaVoice (but not the synthesiser itself). We used the version of IBM ViaVoice bundled with IBM Home Page Reader. However, we were asked by IBM to remove this driver due to the above licensing issues.

Following is a translated letter from Byteway Srl, the Italian distributor of ETI-Eloquence, in response to suspected illegal use of ETI-Eloquence by NVDA users:

Sirs,
I have read in various mailing lists that the ETI Eloquence Synthesis, property of Nuance International BVBA, is used by some integrators without the regular License Agreement and thus without the right of using this technology for commercial or divulgation purposes.
Furthermore, I read that the ETI Eloquence is used by end users in combination with third parties applications for which no right of usage is granted by the producer.
At the present moment only two companies (in Italy), Cavazza 2000 and ITEX di Marco Gregnanin, are authorized to integrate ETI Eloquence.
As the legal representative of Byteway Srl, distributor of the above mentioned technologies, it is my right and duty to inform that, the persons that do an indiscriminate use of this vocal synthesis are breaking the laws against software piracy.
Thus, I kindly advise to all integrators and end-users to settle their position with respect to the right of using ETI Eloquence as soon as possible.
Byteway will be happy to provide further information, license agreements and prices.
Otherwise, as stated with Nuance's legal office, legal measures will be adopted to defend the interest of the producer and the distributor.
Highest Regards,
Donato Savino, CEO
 d.savino@byteway.it
Byteway Srl
Imaging and Speech Technologies
Milano, Via Roncaglia 14 - ITALY
Tel. +39 02 3809 3651
Fax +39 02 3809 3656
www.byteway.it

Attempts by NV Access to Provide a Solution

NV Access, the organisation which develops and supports NVDA, recognises the importance of ETI-Eloquence to a large portion of its user base. As such, NV Access attempted to make it available for a small cost to NVDA users for use with NVDA.

First, we investigated the possibility of re-selling IBM ViaVoice TTS, as  TTSynth has done for Linux. Unfortunately, after spending several hundred dollars on the SDK, we discovered that the Windows version of IBM ViaVoice TTS uses the registry to store its configuration, which makes it unsuitable for use with a portable screen reader such as NVDA. (ETI-Eloquence itself does not use the registry.)

Second, we investigated the possibility of re-selling ETI-Eloquence itself. Unfortunately, the lowest cost that Nuance would negotiate was $15AUD per license if we purchased 300 licenses. In order to cover our costs, compensate for the possibility that we might not sell 300 copies and provide some extra funding for NV Access, we would need to charge users a higher price, but this price from Nuance doesn't give us much to work with before the cost to users becomes unreasonable.

Are There Any Legal Options?

As far as we are aware, the only legal option for using NVDA with ETI-Eloquence is to purchase  PenVDA, which includes NVDA and a specifically licensed copy of ETI-Eloquence. Unfortunately, PenVDA is quite expensive (at least $120USD depending on where you purchase it). Please note that PenVDA is in no way affiliated with NV Access and its cost does not contribute to NVDA development.

We are pleased to announce that NVDA 2010.1 has been released. This release has been declared stable, which means it is suitable for production use and is recommended for most users.

NVDA 2010.1 focuses primarily on bug fixes and improvements to the user experience, including some significant stability fixes.

The only changes from 2010.1rc1 to 2010.1 are updates to some translations.

Download links and change log:

• NVDA 2010.1 installer
• NVDA 2010.1 portable version
• What's new in 2010.1

NVDA 2010.1rc1 has just been released. This is a release candidate, which means that unless any critical issues are found, this will be almost identical to the final 2010.1 release.

Note that there may be some minor updates to some translations (particularly of the what's new document) in the final release.

Changes from beta1 to rc1:

• Updated translations.
• Updated what's new.
• Fixed various harmless but annoying exceptions.
• In Miranda IM, automatic message reading is now also supported in the srmm plugin.
• Fixed problems in file selection dialogs in Miranda IM. (#580)
• Fixed some problems with logging of messages containing non-ASCII characters. This could cause spurious errors in some cases on non-English systems. (#581)
• The information in the About NVDA dialog now appears in the user's configured language instead of always appearing in English. (#586)
• Problems are no longer encountered when using the synthesiser settings ring after the voice is changed to one which has less settings than the previous voice.
• In Skype 4.2, contact names are no longer spoken twice in the contact list.
• Fixed some potentially major memory leaks in the GUI and in virtual buffers. (#590, #591)
• Focusing Total Commander lists other than the main list of files now functions correctly.
• Updated eSpeak to 1.43.03.
• Work around a nasty bug in some SAPI 4 synthesisers that was causing frequent errors and crashes in NVDA. (#597)

Download links and change log:

• NVDA 2010.1rc1 installer
• NVDA 2010.1rc1 portable version
• What's new in 2010.1rc1

We're pleased to announce that NVDA 2010.1beta1 has just been released. It is intended for those who are interested in testing and evaluating the upcoming NVDA 2010.1 release, but is not recommended for production use. Testers are encouraged to report any bugs found while using this beta.

Note that some translations may not yet be updated. They will be updated by the time of the final 2010.1 release.

NVDA 2010.1 focuses primarily on bug fixes and improvements to the user experience, including some significant stability fixes.

Download links and change log:

• NVDA 2010.1beta1 installer
• NVDA 2010.1beta1 portable version
• What's new in 2010.1beta1

NVDA will feature in ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) TV's  New Inventors show on Wednesday 10 March. IF you're in Australia, tune in to ABC1 at 8pm to watch Mick and I demonstrating and talking about NVDA!

Recently a new email list has been created specifically for support questions about NVDA. Please visit:  The nvda-support page for further information. Users are wecome to ask any questions in relation to how to use NVDA, and other users or the project maintainers will be more than happy to answer. However before joining, please note the rules outlined on  The nvda-support page. Look forward to seeing you there.

We are extremely pleased to announce that NVDA 2009.1 has finally been released. This release has been declared stable, which means it is suitable for production use and is recommended for most users.

Major highlights of NVDA 2009.1 include support for 64 bit editions of Windows; greatly improved support for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Adobe Reader documents; support for Windows 7; reading of the Windows logon, control+alt+delete and User Account Control (UAC) screens; and the ability to interact with Adobe Flash and Sun Java content on web pages. There have also been several significant stability fixes and improvements to the general user experience.

Changes from 2009.1rc1 to 2009.1:

• Minor documentation and translation updates.
• NVDA no longer freezes in Save As dialogs on Windows XP and Vista systems with the Platform Update installed.
• The title of the Windows Logon screen is now always read in Windows Vista and Windows 7.
• Fixed a problem with the report date and time command (NVDA+f12). Previously, date reporting was truncated on some systems. (#471)
• Fixed the issue where the system screen reader flag was sometimes inappropriately cleared after interacting with secure Windows screens. This could cause problems in applications which check the screen reader flag, including Skype, Adobe Reader and Jart. (#462)
• In an Internet Explorer 6 combo box, the active item is now reported when it is changed. (#342)
• Dynamic updates in Adobe Reader documents (e.g. changes to form fields) are now properly reflected by NVDA. (This used to work, but regressed a few months ago.)
• NVDA now behaves correctly when an Adobe Reader document is scrolled by other means (e.g. pressing control+pageDown) before NVDA has itself scrolled the document in response to movement of the virtual cursor.

Download links and change log:

• NVDA 2009.1 installer
• NVDA 2009.1 portable version
• What's new in 2009.1

NVDA 2009.1rc1 has just been released. This is a release candidate, which means that unless any critical issues are found, this will be almost identical to the final 2009.1 release. The major change since the beta which should be tested is that installed copies can now fully access applications running as administrator in Windows Vista and Windows 7. This is not possible for portable copies.

Note that there may be some minor updates to some translations (particularly of the what's new document) in the final release.

Changes from beta1 to rc1:

• Updates to translations.
• Fixes to documentation.
• Fixed an issue which caused embedded objects not to be rendered in Mozilla Firefox 3.7 nightly builds.
• Fixed issues when pressing upArrow or downArrow in the password field of the Windows XP logon screen.
• Fixed an issue where NVDA would fail when navigating certain documents in Adobe Reader.
• The report text selection command (NVDA+shift+upArrow) now gracefully reports that there is no selection in objects which do not support text selection.
• The Save As dialog in the NVDA Log Viewer no longer causes NVDA to freeze in Windows 7. (#439)
• Fixed broken reporting of text under the mouse in many editable text controls and Windows command consoles.
• Fixed the issue where pressing the enter key on certain Miranda-IM buttons or links was causing NVDA to freeze. (#440)
• The current line or selection is now properly respected when spelling or copying the current navigator object.
• Fixed the issue where NVDA was sometimes not terminated properly on secure desktops when fast desktop switches occurred. This could cause the Windows control+alt+delete screen to fail to appear or multiple copies of NVDA to run at once on the Windows logon and shutdown screens. (This was fixed previously, but regressed a few days before beta1 was released.)
• Worked around a Windows bug which was causing garbage to be spoken after the name of link controls in Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer dialogs. (#451)
• NVDA can now fully access applications running as administrator in Windows Vista and later. You must install an official release of NVDA for this to work. This does not work for portable versions and snapshots. (#397)
• The NVDA error sound is no longer played in release candidates and final releases. Note that errors are still logged.

Changes in the build process for official releases:

• Python optimisations are enabled.
• All main executables are signed with the NV Access code signing certificate.

Download links and change log:

• NVDA 2009.1rc1 installer
• NVDA 2009.1rc1 portable version
• What's new in 2009.1rc1

We're pleased to announce that NVDA 2009.1beta1 has just been released. It is intended for those who are interested in testing and evaluating the upcoming NVDA 2009.1 release, but is not recommended for production use. Testers are encouraged to report any bugs found while using this beta.

Note that some translations may not yet be updated. They will be updated by the time of the final 2009.1 release.

Major highlights of NVDA 2009.1 include support for 64 bit editions of Windows; greatly improved support for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Adobe Reader documents; support for Windows 7; reading of the Windows logon, control+alt+delete and User Account Control (UAC) screens; and the ability to interact with Adobe Flash and Sun Java content on web pages. There have also been several significant stability fixes and improvements to the general user experience.

Download links and change log:

• NVDA 2009.1beta1 installer
• NVDA 2009.1beta1 portable version
• What's new in 2009.1beta1

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.

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.

We're pleased to announce a formal partnership with  Yahoo! to support the NVDA project. Their first funding contribution will enable us to implement enhanced table navigation and reporting in virtual buffers, ARIA land marks, ARIA drag and drop and other ARIA improvements in NVDA over the next couple of months. This will greatly improve the experience on the web for NVDA users for both web pages and advanced web applications. We'd like to thank Yahoo! for their support and hope to continue this partnership into the future.

 NV Access is pleased to have received a 2009 Making a Difference award presented by  Vision Australia for its work on NVDA. You can read more about this on  NV Access's blog post.

Several months ago, we started work to allow NVDA to read secure Windows screens such as the Windows logon screen, User Account Control (UAC) screens, the Windows lock screen and the control+alt+delete screen. This work stalled for several months, but due to increasing requests from users (as well as our own frustration), I finally revitalised the effort a couple of weeks ago. I am happy to announce that this work has now been merged into the main NVDA development branch, which means that it is now available for testing by users in daily snapshots. There are doubtless some issues still to be fixed, but this should now be quite useable. This code also added an option to the General Settings dialog which allows you to configure the system to automatically start NVDA after logging on to Windows. In addition, there is an option to configure whether NVDA will be used on the Windows logon screen. Disabling this will still allow other Windows secure screens to be read while NVDA is running.

Some additional info for those that care: The standard way to configure assistive technology products to access secure Windows screens on Windows Vista and later is to use the Ease of Access framework. However, using a service (which is the approach used for Windows XP) appears to work quite well on Windows Vista and later as well. Therefore, rather than implementing support for Ease of Access in NVDA, we just use the service for all supported versions of Windows for now. (The documentation for Ease of Access is also incorrect in some areas, which stops us from implementing useable support right now.) We may consider implementing support for Ease of Access later if we discover a significant reason to do this.

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.)

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.

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.

It is drawing towards the end of the year for which the  Mozilla Foundation provided a grant to NV Access to employ me to work full time on NVDA. This post examines the grant goals and summarises our progress for each goal. It is important to note that the original grant goals were written for a three year period, whereas this grant was for one year.

1. NVDA Core Development

* General core improvements: This includes speed improvements, memory usage optimisation, fixing memory leaks and improvements to user experience.

We have made many considerable improvements to the performance, stability, accuracy and reliability of NVDA throughout the year. We constantly strive to ensure that the NVDA code is efficient, optimal and reliable. The user interface has also evolved to better serve its users.

* Debugging and testing: Improvements to the debugging facilities in NVDA will assist in finding and fixing problems. In addition, an automated testing system needs to be developed to allow for faster discovery of problems and to prevent unnoticed regressions in functionality.

NVDA's logging code was refactored to be more flexible and simpler for developers to use. The log viewer was introduced to facilitate quick viewing of the log file for the running copy of NVDA. The Python console, which provides an interactive Python interpreter inside NVDA, has vastly simplified and expanded the possibilities of debugging, research and testing. Unfortunately, an automated testing system has not yet been developed.

* IAccessible 2 support: IAccessible 2 is an emerging accessibility API that has the potential to vastly improve the accessibility of many applications and is thus very important for NVDA's success. It is already used by a growing amount of important applications, including such applications as Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird and Chatzilla which use Mozilla Gecko / XUL.

Since early 2007, NVDA has had comprehensive support for IAccessible2 and uses it wherever it has been implemented in applications. Particularly worthy of note is NVDA's use of IAccessible2 in Mozilla applications, where the rich accessibility provided by IAccessible2 is especially benefitial. In 2008, as well as general enhancements to this support, we implemented support for text attributes, which enables NVDA to read formatting information, spelling errors, etc.

2. Braille Output Support

NVDA should support dynamic output of both contracted and uncontracted braille on various popular refreshable braille displays.

Braille display support has now been implemented, including support for cursor routing. Users have been extremely impressed by the speed and responsiveness of this implementation. Some noteable features are still missing and some polish is required, but this initial implementation is very useable already. NVDA attracted the attention of the braille display manufacturer  Handy Tech, who participated in the initial design and prototyping of NVDA's braille support and provided a driver for their displays.

3. NVDA Customisation for Applications and Web Pages

There was little significant change to NVDA's support for application specific scripting. The code documentation and design were improved slightly. However, there has been no request or need for enhancements or changes to this functionality, although there is definitely room for improvement concerning documentation for new developers. NVDA has no functionality to facilitate customisation for specific web sites. Again, there has been no request or need for this in NVDA from our users so far. The  WebVisum Firefox extension has facilitated some page customisation. WebVisum is independent of the screen reader used and its page modifications are automatically shared by its user community. Due to its popularity with NVDA users, we made some changes to NVDA to better support WebVisum.

4. Static Web Support

I will address only Mozilla Gecko 1.9 (used in Firefox/Thunderbird 3.x) here, as this is what concerns Mozilla. It is worth noting that NVDA's early support of Gecko 1.9 meant that it was able to work with Firefox 3.0 out of the box as soon as it was released.

* Fast, efficient access to basic html content in a flat representation

NVDA renders most pages presented with Mozilla Gecko such that no additional delay is perceived by the user. Some highly complex pages involving many nodes may incur a noticeable delay, but these tend to be the exception rather than the rule. Pages are rendered into a flat representation which can be read and navigated like a normal text document. Once rendered, navigating the page is instantaneous. The first official release to include this functionality was 0.6p1 in March 2008.

* Support for dynamic updates to a page resultant to JavaScript events

Dynamic updates are automatically reflected in the flat representation of the page (the virtual buffer).

* Synchronicity between the flat representation and the actual controls to provide access to forms, and to facilitate navigation of a page using a hierarchical structure

This synchronisation has now been achieved. Users can choose to interact with a control from within the flat representation, and the cursor position within the flat representation will be updated appropriately when a control receives focus. In addition, object navigation can be used to hierarchically navigate a page, with the review cursor moving to the appropriate position in the flat representation.

5. Research and Development of New Accessibility Concepts

These concepts included:

• Accessible drag and drop
• Custom accessible widgets
• Mathematics accessibility
• Diagram accessibility

Accessible drag and drop is already possible through the use of ARIA drag and drop. This has not yet been implemented in NVDA. (See below for more details.) There is not yet a complete specification or application implementation for the remaining three items. We have been participants in working groups concerning the development of these specifications and plan to participate to a larger extent in future work.

6. Web Application Support

* ARIA widgets

NVDA now has very useable support for ARIA widgets, although some polish is required in certain areas. In strong commendation of this support, NVDA has featured in several presentations by Yahoo developers about ARIA widgets; see this blog post for one example.

* Rich text editing in rich internet applications

NVDA does have some support for this. However, it is buggy and incomplete. Improving this to a satisfactory level will be quite a large, difficult undertaking.

* Live regions

NVDA has very limited, unsatisfactory support for live regions at present. Implementing better support is quite difficult under Windows. (Technically, this is due to the need to go in-process for efficient handling of events.)

* ARIA drag and drop

This is not currently supported, although we have investigated this and have some idea of how it will be implemented.

* HTML 5

This requires more work in web browsers before it can be considered in NVDA.

7. XUL Application Support

As already mentioned, NVDA has comprehensive support for IAccessible2 and the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine, which means that accessible widgets in recent XUL applications should be accessible.

* Thunderbird

NVDA has excellent support for Mozilla Thunderbird 3. Many users, including us, use Thunderbird as our email client of choice.

* Komodo

This is untested.

* Songbird

This is untested. We have reason to believe that more work may be required in Songbird to make it accessible.

* Miro

This is untested.

* Popular Mozilla extensions; e.g. Adblock Plus

Popular Mozilla extensions are far too numerous to test and report upon here. Noteably, NVDA works very well with  Adblock Plus and  WebVisum.

8. Mozilla Accessibility Community Interaction

* Filing bugs for Mozilla issues

At the time of this writing, we have filed  32 bugs related to Mozilla accessibility. Additionally, many more have been communicated to the Mozilla accessibility team (primarily Aaron Leventhal and Marco Zehe) for filing by them.

* General interaction with the Mozilla accessibility community

We regularly participate in discussions with both users and developers in the Mozilla accessibility community via its mailing list and IRC channel.

* Involvement in and Contribution to the development of accessibility frameworks and standards

We have participated in and contributed to the development of the IAccessible2 accessibility API. We have also provided feedback on ARIA issues such as landmarks.

9. NVDA Community Development

The development of the resources described below has encouraged a strong, diverse community of both users and contributors supporting the NVDA project, which continues to grow steadily. The NVDA web site received a major overhaul in mid 2008. All of our web services were integrated into one site based on  Trac, which allows for seemless referencing and interaction between services, greater community collaboration and ease of maintenance, among other benefits.

* Development documentation

Some development articles are provided on the NVDA wiki. Much of NVDA's code includes documentation and comments, although there is still quite a bit of undocumented code. Further development articles are probably required to assist new developers who wish to contribute to NVDA.

* Issue database

An issue database was established in 2007. People can report and view issues in this database. Although the system was always used to some degree, we began to use it to a much greater extent in 2008 and strongly encouraged both users and other developers to use it as well. This has been quite successful and has greatly improved the management of the project, as well as increasing community contribution.

* Community resources; e.g. mailing lists, wiki, blog, etc.

• The Community page provides information about mailing lists and the NVDA IRC channel, as well as links to other sites related to NVDA that have been created by the community.
• The NVDA web site is largely based around a wiki. The Documentation page provides links to categories of wiki articles relevant to users and developers.
• The NVDA blog is regularly updated with news and progress updates.

10. Assisting Application Developers to Implement Accessibility

* Promoting application accessibility

We constantly strive to promote application accessibility through our strong participation and presence in various accessibility communities, as well as our work with application developers such as Mozilla. We seek to improve accessibility in general by assisting in the development of new accessibility technologies such as IAccessible2. We encourage interest and open participation by regularly keeping the community up to date through our blog. We have filed or contributed to accessibility bug reports and enhancement requests for several products, and have made similar requests for other products via other means. Through the recent grant from Microsoft, we will provide a public case study of the emerging UI Automation API from the perspective of a screen reader and will implement support for UI Automation in NVDA, as well as testing and providing feedback on accessibility in Windows 7.

* Documenting strategies, techniques and examples for implementing optimal accessibility

Although we have certainly participated in discussion about such documentation, we have not written any ourselves at this time.

* Providing tools and consultation to assist application developers in implementing accessibility

NVDA itself serves as an invaluable tool which assists application developers in implementing accessibility. The blog post about Yahoo developers using NVDA cited above is just one example. Integrated tools such as the Python console and the display synthesiser (which displays text that would normally be sent to a synthesiser in a window on the screen) have been very useful to application developers. We have provided advice to developers of software such as  foobar2000 seeking to improve accessibility.

Conclusion

With regard to success criteria, the grant proposal stated:

The success of this grant will be determined by the progress of NVDA in general, with particular emphasis on the goals described above, especially those related to Mozilla software. As noted above, due to the new territory being explored, some of these goals may change. However, these goals should be mostly completed, allowing for deviations as appropriate.

Most of the important goals were achieved with great success. Two noteable exceptions are satisfactory support for live regions and rich text editing, both extremely complex undertakings. Some goals were unachievable due to the lack of complete specification or application implementation. In addition, it must again be emphasised that the original grant goals were written for a three year period, rather than the one year covered by this grant. The benefits that NVDA has had for the community are evident in the rapid growth in NVDA's popularity. NVDA 0.6p2 has been downloaded over 18000 times since its release in August 2008. NVDA has also received considerable Recognition, including an article in the press, reviews, testimonials and an award. Given all of these factors, we believe that this grant has been very successful.

The  Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference, hosted by California State University, Northridge (and thus usually known simply as the CSUN conference), is perhaps the world's largest conference on assistive technology. Thanks to the generocity and support of the  Mozilla Foundation, Mick attended CSUN 2007 and both Mick and I attended CSUN 2008. We gained a great deal from these conferences, as they enabled us to meet and share information and ideas with prominent figures in the industry, as well as giving us a fantastic opportunity to spread the word about NVDA. For CSUN 2009, given the positive response from users and the industry as a whole, we decided to take a step forward and run our own presentation about NVDA. We are pleased to announce that our submission was accepted. We are very much looking forward to the conference and are keen to once again spread the word about open accessibility technology from the Mozilla booth. CSUN 2009 will be held from 16-21 March at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott & Renaissance Montura Hotels.

Following is the abstract for our presentation.

NVDA: A FREE, OPEN SOURCE SCREEN READER FOR MICROSOFT WINDOWS

Michael Curran
President/Software Developer
NV Access Inc.
Email:  mick@nvaccess.org

James Teh
Vice President/Software Developer
NV Access Inc.
Email:  jamie@nvaccess.org

NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) is a free, open source screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Providing feedback via synthetic speech and braille, it enables blind and vision impaired users to access a computer running Microsoft Windows for no more cost than a sighted person. In the short time since its inception in mid 2006, NVDA has already developed into a viable alternative to commercial screen readers, outperforming them in some areas. It has rapidly gained popularity and is used by many blind and vision impaired people across the globe. As at November 2008, the current version had been downloaded over 10000 times since its release less than three months prior. In this session, the primary developers of NVDA will provide an introduction to NVDA, including a discussion of its history, features, philosophy, community drive, design and plans for the future. Demonstrations will be provided where appropriate. NVDA began its life in mid 2006 when Michael Curran, unhappy with the excessive cost of existing screen readers, endeavoured to write his own screen reader in the Python programming language. In the first part of this session, the history of the NVDA project will be outlined, right from its humble beginnings to the considerable success it enjoys today. This will include the introduction of the other primary developer, James Teh, to the project, the creation of NV Access as a non-profit supporting organisation for the NVDA project, and Michael's journey to CSUN 2007. Subsequently, the increasing support of the Mozilla Foundation will be covered, including the grants they provided to enhance support for Mozilla Firefox and to employ James full time. CSUN 2008's impact on the project will then be discussed, followed by the developments in the rest of the year. Perhaps the greatest appeal of NVDA is its zero cost, but this is certainly not a reflection of its quality or functionality. The session will focus on the many features of NVDA and the benefits they offer to its users. This includes its vast support for over twenty languages (all of which are included in the main distribution) and bundling with the free, open-source, multilingual speech synthesiser eSpeak. NVDA'S ability to run entirely from portable media such as USB flash drives will be covered, as well as the optional capability for installation with a talking installer. There will be a focus on NVDA's excellent support for Mozilla Firefox 3, including quick navigation keys, links list, support for the Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) standard and basic support for live regions, as well as support for Mozilla Thunderbird 3, accessible Java applications and Windows Command Prompt and console applications. Innovative features such as audible progress bar beeps and audible indication of the mouse position will be outlined. As well as describing these features, the session will detail how they have been applied by users in their daily lives and why a user might choose NVDA over its commercial equivalents. The guiding principle of both NV Access and the NVDA project is that accessibility should not be an extra cost for the user. The session will explain how NV Access fulfills this goal and the philosophy of NV Access and NVDA, including their commitment to openness and community. First, the benefits of open source software will be discussed, such as the ability to draw on a diverse, global pool of development expertise and the benefits of openly sharing knowledge for accessibility as a whole. These benefits are very much evident in the multitude of contributions already made to NVDA by the global community. Peter Vágner, the internationalisation coordinator for NVDA, will talk about his role in managing the translation and internationalisation effort, which has assisted in making NVDA's excellent multilingual capabilities a reality. There will also be discussion surrounding the NVDA developers' active participation in and support of the development of other open source software as well as open accessibility standards and technologies. Marco Zehe from the Mozilla Corporation will discuss the relationship between Mozilla and the NVDA project, which has had substantial benefits for both parties. Also, importantly, the growth of NVDA's own community will be discussed, including the development of community resources such as the NVDA web site, email lists, blog entries, an internet relay chat channel and an issue tracking system for users to report and discuss bugs and feature requests. Finally, NVDA's potential for innovation and experimentation will be covered.

NVDA's success as a product is in no small way due to the care with which it has been designed and implemented. The developers will briefly describe the principles underlying NVDA's design and implementation. This includes the use of the Python programming language to enable simple, rapid development, the extensible, modular, abstract design, and the focus on accuracy and efficiency.

The final part of this session will outline possible plans for the future for both NV Access and the NVDA project. Topics discussed will include the enhancement of support for Internet Explorer, support for UI Automation, the ability to read display information and improved support for office suites.

Microsoft has recently decided to support  NV Access and the NVDA screen reader project by providing funding and support that will allow NV Access to improve NVDA in two key areas:

• Allowing NVDA to support Microsoft's UI Automation API in Windows 7 (the next Microsoft Windows Operating System); and
• Improving NVDA's support for Microsoft Internet Explorer and other related applications.

Please visit the NV Access site for a  more detailed blog post.

There have now been over 10000 downloads of NVDA 0.6p2 since its release on 7 August, less than three months ago. At the time of this writing, there have been 10459 downloads. Thank you to all of you for your support. NVDA certainly wouldn't be what it is without the fantastic community that surrounds it.

NVDA 0.6p2 has just been released. The release is almost two weeks later than the original estimate proposed at the recent hack fest, as we decided to implement some additional noteworthy features, user interface changes, bug fixes and documentation updates.

Please note that this is a preview release, meaning that there are still some major issues to be fixed before the final 0.6 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 0.6p2 installer
• NVDA 0.6p2 portable version
• What's new in 0.6p2

NVDA features prominently in this post (and accompanying video) on the Yahoo UI blog:  Enhancing TabView Accessibility with WAI-ARIA Roles and States

This highlights one of the great benefits and potential uses of NVDA. The fact that NVDA is free and open source software allows developers to test the accessibility of their web sites and/or applications with a fully functional screen reader without having to purchase an expensive product they would not otherwise use.

Aside from the great plug for NVDA (thanks!), this is an excellent, well documented use of WAI-ARIA to improve web accessibility.

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.

As many of you can probably attest, services on nvda-project.org, including the web site and Trac, have been extremely unreliable over the past few months. There has been frequent downtime, sometimes lasting for hours at a time, and even when services were functional, they were often extremely slow. Thus, a few weeks ago, we decided that it was time to move to a new server. Rather than moving to another service hosting package, we opted for our own virtual server. While this increases the technical administration tedium that Mick and I must endure, it also allows for much greater flexibility.

Despite the rather shaky transition, all services for nvaccess.org and nvda-project.org have now been moved to the new server. There certainly does appear to be a definite improvement in speed and reliability and we're hoping it will continue thus.

As I begin writing this, I'm sitting on a plane enduring the 13 hour flight back to Sydney from Los Angeles. As many of you know, the week prior to CSUN was insanely busy, as Mick and I hurried to make the 0.6p1 release in time for the conference. (In fact, we ended up deferring the release until soon after we arrived in the U.S.) CSUN was similarly busy, which, alongside far too little sleep, has left us exhausted. Despite a consequent need for some serious R&R, CSUN 2008 was an absolutely fantastic experience, both for NVDA and for Mick and I personally.

We arrived in L.A. late on Monday morning and were settled into our hotel room by around lunch time. No one else we knew was to arrive before Tuesday afternoon, so we spent the first two days working on some final touches for 0.6p1, which was released some time on Tuesday afternoon. (Unfortunately, we also had to endure a dodgy internet connection during this work, which persisted in its dodginess throughout the week. Arrrg!) We also burnt around 30 CDs containing NVDA, Firefox 3beta4 and information about both for distribution to potential new users whom we encountered during the conference.

10 a.m. on Wednesday morning saw us at the IAccessible2 face to face meeting. This ended up exceeding its 1 hour time slot by almost another hour! Discussion was quite broad, covering IAccessible2 itself but also extending beyond into many other topics relating to open accessibility standards. Nevertheless, i think the meeting was very successful. We were told that IAccessible2 support for OpenOffice?.org would hopefully ship in a 3.x release some time within the next year, which is very exciting. There was a great deal of discussion in terms of the future of IAccessible2, especially relating to the establishment of guidelines beyond the specification for application implementations. Currently, there are widely varying ideas on how IAccessible2 should be implemented, with applications such as Lotus Symphony taking a rather flat approach as compared with Mozilla Gecko's extremely hierarchical approach. Mick and I believe that there need to be guidelines for the ways in which IAccessible2 should be implemented in various applications to prevent this getting out of hand. This idea was met with overall approval and a great deal of discussion ensued as to how this might be achieved. Other issues included problems with the use of IAccessible2 for portable applications and assistive technologies, feedback regarding Accessibility Probe, problems with the dependence of IAccessible 2 on MSAA and potential minor changes to the specification. Aside from the useful outcomes, it was great for me to meet the team behind this excellent accessibility API face to face.

On Wednesday evening, we had a dinner meeting with the NVDA Japanese localisation team. Our meeting spanned several hours, although it was interrupted several times by the need to adjourn to different locations. We discussed the status of the NVDA Japanese localisation and a demonstration was given with a commercial Japanese speech engine. We then covered a couple of localisation problems. The first concerned certain Japanese punctuation marks which aren't handled by the synthesiser used. While we handle expansion of English punctuation marks, there is no provision for doing this for other language specific symbols. Second, we discussed Windows input method editors (IME), which are necessary for entry of characters in pictographic languages such as Japanese. NVDA currently has no support for this. We would certainly like NVDA to support this, so Mick and I asked many general questions about how this works. We then spoke about the possibility of open source Japanese speech synthesisers. Mick and I suggested that efforts be made to improve the current eSpeak Japanese language so that an additional synthesiser would not be needed for Japanese NVDA users. Finally, the team explained the current state of screen readers in Japan. There are no good free alternatives and Japanese commercial screen readers are quite expensive, which is why they believe NVDA is important for Japan. It was a very pleasant meeting and it was great to receive some face to face feedback from a localisation team.

Thursday was the first day on which the exhibit hall was open. We spent much of our time for the remainder of the conference assisting at the Mozilla booth in the exhibit hall, preaching the goodness of Firefox 3 accessibility and, where appropriate, NVDA. We had very few opportunities to actually demonstrate NVDA. On the other hand, we spoke to many people from widely varying groups and levels of experience and gave away most of our CDs. It was humbling and gratifying to have quite a number of people, both users and otherwise, visit just to tell us that they appreciate the work we're doing. A highlight for us was a visit from a group of vision impaired primary school students accompanied by a teacher. She did not know about NVDA and was very pleased when we told her of the project. She told us that it would be great for some of her students whose families probably could not afford to purchase any of the commercial screen readers and took several of our CDS for her students, even coming back to take more for others. This is a fantastic validation of the mission of NV Access and NVDA: to lower the barrier to accessible computing. Furthermore, young students like these are not biased by prior use of another product, so in some ways, they are perhaps most likely to make the most of NVDA.

In terms of Mozilla, many people, existing users and otherwise, were impressed by the new accessibility features in Firefox 3. Being primarily concerned with accessibility for screen reader users, I must confess to having paid little attention to accessibility features for other users. There was a great deal of interest in the new full page zoom feature for low vision users. As well, the rich accessibility API support offered by Firefox 3 has potential benefits for users of voice dictation software. Again, many people visited just to say that they appreciated the work of Mozilla. There was also a great deal of interest in the merchandise up for grabs, which included an abundance of stickers, badges, temporary tattoos and brochures. Almost all of this had been taken by the end of the conference.

Thursday night was spent at a dinner with all of the people assisting at the Mozilla booth. (Well, actually, we first had to endure a rather frustrating, crazy cab ride, but I digress.) Most were either fellow grantees or people otherwise involved with Mozilla who were volunteering. Frank Hecker, the CEO of the Mozilla Foundation, was also present. It was great to spend an evening with such a fantastic, sincere group of people.

On Friday afternoon, we attended the IAccessible2 development panel, a session open to the public in which "Lead software applications and assistive technology developers [got] together to share their experiences in supporting IAccessible2". Present were representatives from IBM, Dolphin, GW Micro, Sun Microsystems, Freedom Scientific, Ai Squared, Adobe Systems and NV Access, with Mick speaking for NV Access. Each spoke a little about their current implementation of or plans to implement IAccessible2 support, some also speaking of their involvement in its design. Mick spoke of the IAccessible2 support in NVDA and why we believe it to be important for accessibility. He mentioned the current shortcomings in NVDA's support, including the lack of support for tables (which, by the way, is something we want to rectify very soon). Most of the assistive technology developers have also implemented at least partial support for IAccessible2, although some currently use it only for certain applications. We learnt that Adobe are starting to implement support, which is great news for us. In the discussion of problems and future plans, Mick raised the issue of the current inability to run IAccessible2 applications and assistive technologies portably due to the need to register a proxy library. A potential solution was proposed, which we have since investigated and found to be quite promising.

As is often the case at such conferences, even socialising after hours provided a fantastic opportunity for networking. One such occasion was a discussion with some of the core development team for Orca, the open source screen reader for the Gnome GUI under Linux and Solaris. One outcome of this discussion was that both teams agreed to try to collaborate wherever possible. We have always been open to such collaboration, but this was a great opportunity to become properly acquainted. On another occasion, we were introduced to the person at Microsoft responsible for accessibility of Internet Explorer 8.

One of the few conference sessions we attended was on Saturday afternoon. This was entitled "Low-Cost and Free Screen Access Solutions Versus Full-Feature Software" and was presented by the National Federation of the Blind. We had no idea whether NVDA would be covered or how it would fare if it was. Initially, we felt that perhaps the description of the free and low-cost solutions as not being "full-featured software" was a bit unfair, but I guess it is true that we still have a lot of work to do to match some of the more expensive products. Conversely, we were pleasantly surprised by the fair demonstration of NVDA. We waited with bated breath to find out which version of NVDA would be demonstrated and were relieved to discover that 0.6p1, the release we had prepared only days earlier, was featured. (NVDA has certainly come a long way since 0.5.) The other featured screen readers were Thunder and Serotek System Access. Overall, it was a worthwhile presentation and I hope it inspired some people to at least give solutions such as NVDA a try.

Over the duration of the conference, we met and conversed with several key accessibility people from large organisations such as IBM, Sun, Adobe and Microsoft. In addition, we spoke to several people who were interested in collaborating with us in some way or potentially distributing NVDA with their products. It was gratifying once again to realise the respect we have attained in the field of accessibility. We were astounded to learn of the amount of interest NVDA has attracted. Mick and I also took the opportunity on occasion to investigate some of the other exhibits.

Overall, CSUN 2008 was a very enjoyable, benefitial and worthwhile experience, both for NVDA and for us personally. I very much hope that both Mick and I are able to attend the conference again next year.

We have just released NVDA 0.6p1. This is a preview release, meaning that there are still major issues to be fixed before the final 0.6 release. However, this provides a preview of some of the new functionality that can be expected in 0.6. This release will be featured at CSUN 2008. For more information about the current status of releases, see this article.

Download links:

• NVDA 0.6p1 installer
• NVDA 0.6p1 portable [zip file]
• NVDA 0.6p1 changes [text file]

Mick and I will be attending the  Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference (better known as CSUN) commencing in approximately two weeks. Once again, this is thanks to the generosity of the  Mozilla Foundation. This should be an exciting event for NVDA, as NVDA has progressed a great deal since last year's conference.

Perhaps the most exciting recent development is the new in-process virtual buffer back-end for Mozilla Gecko 1.9, which is used by Firefox 3 and Thunderbird 3. In practical terms, this means that rendering pages into a virtual buffer in these programs is now practically instantaneous and is far more accurate than the previous code. Although it is not quite yet as stable as we would like, it is almost ready for public testing. We're very keen to show this off at the conference! :) We are also working to address several other items in NVDA prior to CSUN.

Please see CSUN 2008 Plans for more information, including our "to do" list and a rough schedule. If any of you are interested in joining or collaborating with the NVDA project in some way and want to meet at CSUN, please drop Mick and I an email.

I began working full time for NV Access on NVDA three weeks ago (on Monday, 4 February, to be precise). This was interrupted last week, as I had to work for another week with my previous employer, so I've now been working full time on NVDA for two weeks.

It has certainly been a busy but interesting two weeks. I am obviously quite familiar with the project, given that I have been a core developer almost since the beginning. However, working on a project full time is unsurprisingly somewhat different to casual contribution in one's spare time. Nevertheless, I am very much enjoying the work and am looking forward to realising exciting potential for NVDA as the year progresses.

Mick and I are currently focusing on preparing both ourselves and NVDA for the upcoming  Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference, better known as CSUN. I will post more on this later. I have spent most of my time so far discussing all things NVDA with Mick, fixing small (but nevertheless annoying and problematic) bugs, and helping Mick to test the new virtual buffer code.

I would like to once again extend my personal thanks to the  Mozilla Foundation for making this possible. I am extremely grateful for and excited about the opportunity to devote all of my working hours to further develop NVDA.

Thanks to the generocity and support of the  Mozilla Foundation  NV Access has been able to hire James Teh as a full-time developer to work on NVDA. The Mozilla Foundation has taken a keen interest in NVDA as one of NVDA's goals is to provide excellent support for Mozilla products, such as Firefox and Thunderbird.

The grant (which provides NV Access with US$80,000 over 2008) allows NV Access to employ James Teh (Jamie) full-time to work on improving and maintaining NVDA, with a major focus on Mozilla products. The grant will be also used to cover overheads for the running of NV Access, which a part from general administration, also includes project promotion and the seeking of further funding.

NV Access and Mozilla worked together to draw up a list of grant goals for NVDA, which both organizations see as the most important things that should be achieved to make the project a success. Although the grant will be reviewed before the end of this year, all the goals listed are to be completed with in a three year timeline.

Jamie will hopefully be starting work in the next month or so, once all the admin has been organized. I for one am very excited to have Jamie join the project on a much more full-time basis, and I know he is also very excited to be able to put all his working time to open-source projects that hopefully can improve the lives of people in the community in some way.

On behalf of NV Access, and the other developers of NVDA I would like to thank the Mozilla Foundation for its support over the last year. Together we can make sure that blind users will always have both a free choice when it comes to access to applications on the Microsoft Windows Operating System, and also a choice to move forward with the rest of the community, to use free and open-source products (such as Firefox and Thunderbird).

Last weekend, I flew to Melbourne, Australia (I live in Brisbane) for two exciting events related to NVDA.

On Friday, Mick, Amy, Matt and I attended the Blind Citizens Australia Technology Expo held prior to the BCA national convention, where we staffed a booth for NV Access. Mick and I were providing one on one demonstrations of NVDA under both Windows XP and Vista. We were a bit concerned about the lack of interest for the first hour and a half or so, but after that, things started to heat up. People from widely varying backgrounds and degrees of computing experience visited the booth. We made between six and eight demonstrations (I can't remember the exact number), some of which were quite detailed. Between 15 and 20 people provided us with contact details, requesting further information. We also spoke to several people who were interested in passing the word about NVDA to larger numbers of people through various channels. Everyone was quite impressed by the project and most were somewhat astonished by its $0 price tag. :) Overall, it was a valuable, worthwhile experience. The interest we attracted was somewhat heartening. I think Mick and I learnt a lot about presenting the project to prospective users and other interested parties. We had also underestimated the potential for networking with people who can help further spread the word.

All of Saturday and Sunday morning was devoted to what we are calling an "NVDA Summit" or hack fest. Mick and I sat in his lounge room discussing, coding, living and breathing NVDA... as well as eating Amy's yummy, home-made cookies, among other delicious morsels. (Thanks Amy!) We covered quite a lot of ground, answering all but one of the items on our agenda. The agenda and outcomes are outlined here. Aside from this agenda and discussion of the direction of NVDA in general, the time allowed us to revitalise our working relationship and zeal for the project. It also enabled me to familiarise myself with complex parts of the code which I haven't had a chance to examine in detail due to being somewhat busy with other things of late.

The benefits of this "summit" are already being realised. This week, we have made major leaps forward with regard to the way we read dialogs. Rather than reading the entire dialog or only the dialog title and the current control, we attempt to read the descriptive text or query and then the focused control. This makes for a much nicer user experience when using most dialogs. Also, we have found and squashed a major memory leak which has been plaguing us for a while now. We have improved the speed and accuracy of cursor keys and backspace and delete, although backspace and delete still need some work.

These two events were made possible by many generous donations to NV Access. Many thanks to everyone who has donated.