Welcome to NV Access

NV Access is a non-profit organisation based in Melbourne, Australia. We are dedicated to the ideal that access to technology should not incur an extra cost for blind and vision impaired users. We believe that blind and vision impaired people should be able to use any type of technology for the same cost as their sighted peers. To that end, our primary purpose is to support projects and initiatives that provide free and open source computer software solutions that enable this accessibility.

Currently, we exist primarily to develop and support NVDA, a free, open source screen reader for Microsoft Windows. For more information and to download a copy, please visit  the NVDA web site.

We may also be able to provide paid support and accessibility consulting services. Please contact us if you wish to discuss this further.

News

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 will also help ...

(Read more)

New Grant from the Mozilla Foundation furthers NVDA

We would like to thank the Mozilla Foundation for providing NV Access with another grant allowing  the NVDA screen reader 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 ...

(Read more)

Yahoo! Supports the NVDA Project

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 [ NVDA:wiki:FutureGoals#GeneralARIAImprovements other ARIA improvements ...

(Read more)

A 2009 Vision Australia Making A Difference Award goes to NV Access

NV Access is very pleased to have received a  Making A Difference Award presented by  Vision Australia as part of its 2009 Making A Difference Campaign.

For the past four years Vision Australia has been presenting  Making A Difference awards to individuals, community groups and organisations who have shown outstanding support for ...

(Read more)

NVDA Presentation at CSUN 2009

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 th ...

(Read more)

Microsoft provides grant to improve NVDA

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.

Supporting UI Automation means that NVDA gains access to applications ...

(Read more)

Annual Report 2007-2008 and Website updates

Annual Report 2007-2008

I am happy to announce that the Annual Report for 2007-2008 is now available in the Annual Reports section of the web site.

This is our first Annual Report, as NV Access was created only in March 2007. In the report you will find a President's report, a treasurer's report and finance statements from April 2007 to June 2008.

Website updates

Over the last few months we have been making some changes to the NV Access website which shou ...

(Read more)

Another grant from the Mozilla Foundation

In December 2007, NV Access was approved for another grant from the  Mozilla Foundation in order to hire James Teh (one of the core NVDA developers) on a full-time basis. James was previously working for an IT company and could only contribute to NVDA in his spare time after work and on weekends. This grant from the  Mozilla Foundation will enable him to leave his current employment and dedicate all his working hours to improvin ...

(Read more)

Mozilla Foundation Grant to improve web access in NVDA

In early July, NV Access received a grant for a total of US$10000 from the  Mozilla Foundation to support a re-write of the current web access code for NVDA.

This grant will also allow the programmers to conduct research into determining the most appropriate design and method for NVDA to access web content. It will also enable NVDA to fully support  Mozilla FireFox and its implementation of IAccessible2.

For the NVDA user, the i ...

(Read more)

NVDA version 0.5 is released

 NVDA, or NonVisual Desktop Access, is the first completely free and open-source screen reader for the Windows Operating System. The NVDA project developers have just released version 0.5 of the NVDA screen reader. The release can be downloaded as an installer or a portable ZIP file that can be extracted and run from your hard drive or a USB memory key. To read more about this release of NVDA or to download a copy, go to the [ http://www.nvda-project.org NVDA Proj ...

(Read more)

Sponsors

Donations

To date, NV Access has received a total of AU$14,898.00 in donations. We would like to extend special thanks to all the individuals who have donated to support our projects.