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 improving NVDA. You can read our  list of goals to see what we hope to achieve for NVDA with this new grant from Mozilla. The grant will cover all salary and any overheads associated with the management of this position as well as contribute to the general running costs of NV Access.

NV Access is also looking for organisations or interested parties to partially or fully match this funding in order to hire Michael Curran (the other core NVDA developer)to also work on some of these and other goals in order to continue to make NVDA a viable free screen reader solution for people around the world who are blind or vision impaired.

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 improved web access solution will mean a more usable and faster experience when browsing the web, including better access to the more dynamic content that has been emerging in recent times.

The grant is expected to run until mid 2008. By which time the design, code and initial testing of the new web access solution should be completed. If you would like to read about the technical progress of the grant work, you can visit the  Web Access blog for developers.

 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  NVDA Project web site.

NV Access was created very recently, and at this point we have limited resources to support projects. We do not yet have a physical office and we are all volunteers working from home, working on our own equipment.

Our main goal for the rest of the year is to apply for funding from Australian philanthropic organisations and also to apply for project specific grants from international organisations such as the  Mozilla Foundation.

If you would like to contribute to our projects, then please visit the Projects? page for more information on our projects, and check out the Helping Out page to see how you can help. If you wish to donate to NV Access, you can go straight to the Donate page.