The latest version of NVDA, NV Access's free and open source Screen Reader for Windows, is now available. This release focuses primarily on bug fixes and improvements to the user experience, including some significant stability fixes. You can find out more information, or download a copy from  the NVDA website.

NV Access is happy to announce the availability of NVDA 2009.1, the latest version of the NVDA free and open source Screen Reader for Windows. Please visit  www.nvda-project.org to download a copy. 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 interact with Adobe Flash and Sun Java content on web pages. There have also been several significant stability fixes and improvements to the general user experience.

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 users access content and applications developed with Adobe Flex and interactive forms developed with Adobe LiveCycle.

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.

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  other ARIA improvements in NVDA over the next couple of months. This will greatly improve the experience on the web for NVDA users for both web pages and advanced web applications. We'd like to thank Yahoo! for their support and hope to continue this partnership into the future.

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.

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.

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.