It’s been a busy couple of weeks! We’re about to have a release, we’ve been out and about again, and we’ve been chatting with users (as we love to do)! If you’d like to chat with us to, you can always reach us in the official NVDA user group, on social media, or by email. Before we start, an apology to our email subscribers of In-Process. I forgot to hit send on last fortnight’s email version. Please do catch up on the 30th September In-process here.

Now, here’s what in THIS edition:

1. NVDA 2025.3.1 Release Candidate
2. See Differently Tech Fest
3. Typing Tutors
4. Single Key Navigation Poll
5. Featured Add-on: Screen Wrapping for NVDA

NVDA 2025.3.1 Release Candidate

The Release Candidate (RC) of NVDA 2025.3.1 is now available for download and testing. We encourage all users to download this RC and provide feedback. Unless any critical bugs are found, this will be identical to the final 2025.3.1 release. This is a patch release to fix a security issue and a bug.

• We fixed a vulnerability which could prevent access to secure screens via Remote Access. Advisory GHSA-vr27-g5ph-xvq2 with further details will be publicized 1 week after 2025.3.1 has been released, to ensure NVDA users have a chance to update before detailed disclosure.
• Remote Access now returns control to the local computer if it locks while controlling the remote computer.

We do encourage all users to try out this version, and of course, a reminder that all add-ons which work with NVDA 2025.1 will still work with NVDA 2025.3.1. If you do install the release candidate, we do encourage you to restart your PC after updating, particularly if you encounter any unexpected errors or things not working.

See Differently Tech Fest

Last week NV Access attended See Differently “Tech Fest”. Hosted by See Differently (formerly Royal Society for the Blind) in Adelaide, this is the largest blindness technology expo in Australia, and a very valuable day. We came away with some ideas and inspiration, which will be making its way into things we can share in due course. In the meantime, here is a picture of James and Quentin at the conference, all ready to tell people about NVDA:

Typing Tutors

One thing which came up at Tech Fest was that we were asked for a recommendation for a program to learn touch typing. So, we asked you, our amazingly supportive and helpful community. Between the email user group, and our Mastodon followers, we got some great answers! So, here are the options you suggested – in alphabetic order:

• APH Talking Typer: https://www.aph.org/product/talking-typer-for-windows-digital-download/
• And APH now have an online version of Talking Typer: https://typer.aphtech.org/
• Azabat Typing Tutor: http://www.azabat.co.uk/typing.html
• Talking Typing Teacher from Marvelsoft: http://www.braillebookstore.com/Talking-Typing-Teacher-Standard.1
• Typing Club, learn touch typing for free: https://www.typingclub.com/
• Typio, the accessible typing tutor: https://www.accessibyte.com/typio-online-page/

If you would like to learn to type, there’s sure to be something in that list which will suit you.

Single Key Navigation Poll

And speaking of asking the community – recently, we did another informal Mastodon poll. NVDA has many quick navigation keys (single letters you press to jump to the next element of a certain type on the web). When I’m talking to people about how to navigate the web with NVDA, I’ll often mention a few. I was curious what the “common” ones people relied most on are…. So, I asked!

There were 61 replies. Of those:

• Every single person mentioned “h” for heading, though only 11 mentioned numbers (2 for heading level 2, 3 for h3, etc).
• E for edit field had 39 votes and b for button had 38, making them 2nd and 3rd, but F more generically for the next form field came in at 7th with 14 votes.
• K to jump to the next link was in 4th place with 21 votes (this only asked about quick navigation keys, so I didn’t compare how often people used “K” rather than “tab”).
• T to jump to the next table was 5th with 17 votes, but L for List was 12th with only 8 votes. Once you’re in one of those, Comma to move to the first thing past that list or table got 12 votes.
• D for landmark had 16 votes, X for checkbox had 13 votes, and the last of the top 12 I haven’t yet mentioned is N for non-linked text, which had 10 votes.

Featured Add-on: Screen Wrapping for NVDA

Since we’re talking about Single Letter Navigation keys this week (and there’s a full list at that link), one question we get asked occasionally is around wrapping to top. When you press a key such as “H” for heading, it moves you to the next heading. If there are no more headings on the page, NVDA reports this, and the focus doesn’t move. In order to move to the first heading, you would need to press control+home to jump to the top of the page, then press H again. But, if you would like to be able to press H and have it wrap from the last heading on a page back up to the first one, the add-on community has you covered! “Screen wrapping for NVDA” does exactly this (and if you are above the first heading, and press Shift+h, it wraps to the last one). I’ve used headings in this example, but it works with any single letter navigation element.

Screen wrapping for NVDA is from Hamada Trichine, and you can find it in the add-on store.

That’s all for this fortnight. Do test out the release candidate of NVDA 2025.3.1, and if you’d like to be able to wrap single letter navigation keys, feel free to try the Screen Wrapping for NVDA add-on!