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.

Please see the  post on the NVDA blog for the abstract of the presentation.

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 built on top of Microsoft's .net and Silverlight 2 platforms. UI Automation massivly improves upon Microsoft's older accessibility API (MSAA) by providing greater access to textual and other rich data.

Improved support for Microsoft Internet Explorer is a much requested feature of NVDA by its users. Improvements will include rapid speed ups of page loads due to in-process virtual buffers and an improved user interaction model (including the ability to select text and access a list of links) which users of NVDA have been enjoying already in its support for the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

Not only do the improvements help support for Internet Explorer, but also Windows CHM viewer, Windows Help and Support centre, Windows Mail / Outlook Express and any other application that makes use of the Internet Explorer engine.

This funding from Microsoft has enabled NV Access to employ me full-time along side James Teh to work on the core development of NVDA. The funding will also help to sustain NV Access into the near future.

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 should allow us to more easily maintain and update the content. The layout may have changed a little, but now looks much more similar to the  NVDA project website.