NVDA Weekly Update (December 18 2008)

This past week we have been busy preparing for the up and coming NVDA 0.6 p3 release, which we hope will be out in the next week or so. Work has been mainly fixing bugs that we and users have been noticing as we check that all is working as it should for the release.

I have fixed a bug introduced some time after 0.6p2 where NVDA would not detect that a new page had been loaded in Internet Explorer. This code broke when we moved to a new version of the Python COM Types library, which seems to have changed the way it handles COM events.

Users of Windows Mail or Outlook Express who read their emails in plane text will be happy as now when a message is opened, NVDA makes sure that the user is actually placed on the message text so that they can read it with the arrows. This is actually a bug in the Email software, but NVDA has a pretty simple peace of code to make this a little nicer for the user.

Jamie has been fixing some bugs in NVDA's Audiologic synth driver. As we do not have access to all synthesizers and braille displays we support, it is rather hard to make sure that these drivers will always work. Though we do rely on users to let us know if something does break, and to provide suitable information so that we can try and fix the problem.

I have spent a bit of time fixing some issues with text selection in NVDA. In some situations in Windows, when the user moves away from a text control that has selected text, the selection is unselected at the same time the focus moves. NVDA now should hopefully not inappropriately announce this selection change as the focus moves, as it is some what unuseful to the user. Users may notice this fix especially on the Internet Explorer address bar, and in Thunderbird 3 when moving from an email address field after an address auto-completes.

I have also possibly fixed a small bug in NVDA's support for Outlook Express where it would play its error sound when the user is sending an email.

Jamie has fixed a bug where NVDA would freeze, or read too much, or play its error sound, when bringing up the Bookmarks dialog in Mozilla Firefox. The issue was that NVDA was going in to an endless loop when collecting the text to speak in the dialog. Technically this is a bug with Firefox, but he was able to change the code for other advantages, which also indirectly fixed this problem. He has also improved the rule for when NVDA should respond to alert events and speak them. NVDA will no longer speak an alert event if the focus is already inside it as NVDA therefore must have already spoken the alert.

Finally, Peter has continued to be an extremely important asset to the NVDA project, updating NVDA's language and documentation translations on behalf of our translators, providing support to current and perspective translators, and of course also fixing bugs and adding new features through out NVDA's core and application-specific code. I personally would like to extend my thanks for his time and effort.