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 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.

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 people who are blind or have low vision in their community.

NV Access was recognised especially for the support and development of the  NVDA screen reader which allows blind and low vision users access to the Microsoft Windows Operating System for no more cost than their sighted peers. We would like to acknowledge that NVDA's success is thanks to many more people than just NV Access. We would like to thank NVDA's user community for providing great feedback, NVDA's volunteer developer community (including our many translators), organisations who have provided us with funding, and the many individuals who have donated to us.

We look forward to working with everyone further into the future, to make sure that we can continue to maintain and grow 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 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.