Welcome to the Home of NVDA
NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) is a free and open source screen reader for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Providing feedback via synthetic speech and Braille, it enables blind or vision impaired people to access computers running Windows for no more cost than a sighted person. Major features include support for over 20 languages and the ability to run entirely from a USB drive with no installation.
For more information about NVDA, including features and system requirements, visit the About section.
Check out the Download section if you would like to obtain a copy.
For information about community resources, including email lists, the NVDA IRC chat channel and links to community sites written in other languages, take a look at the Community section.
For documentation about NVDA, visit the Documentation section.
For information on how to report bugs, feature requests, etc., please see ReportingIssues.
See our Recognition page to learn about awards, press coverage, reviews, testimonials and other public recognition we have received.
If you would like to support the project, please consider making a Donation to NV Access.
Contact
If you have a question about NVDA or require technical support, please use the community resources such as email lists. For other inquiries, please contact NV Access.
News
NVDA 2010.1beta1 Released
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, includ ...
NVDA on New Inventors in March!
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!
the nvda-support email list is now here
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 ...
NVDA 2009.1 Released
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 ...
NVDA 2009.1rc1 Released
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 documen ...
NVDA 2009.1beta1 Released
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 im ...
Adobe Provides Grant for PDF and Flash Support in NVDA
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 wi ...
Goodbye Miscellaneous Dependencies Package
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 ...
New Grant from the Mozilla Foundation furthers NVDA
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 ...
What should the next version number be?
We have noticed that some people have been getting a little confused with NVDA's current version numbers. I have also been wondering about them, especially in regards to the closely approaching next stable release.
As a bit of a background: We released NVDA 0.5 in Mid 2007. We then started planning for 0.6. Very early on in the creation of 0.6 we massivly improved support for Mozilla Firefox (introducing the new virtualBuffers). However at the same time we started neglecting the code for In ...
NVDA is developed by 