We’ve got a bumper issue for you this week! Starting with both a new release, and a new beta! Plus, a reminder of the value of the official NVDA user email group; thanks to our friends in Germany; the community has kicked off our #NVDA20 celebrations, and we follow Darrell on his work week using NVDA full time:
- NVDA 2025.3.3
- Restarting after updating
- Where do you get your info?
- #NVDA20
- Thank you Germany!
- NVDA 2026.1 Beta 4
- One week with NVDA
NVDA 2025.3.3
We are pleased to advise that NVDA 2025.3.3 is now available. This is a small patch release to fix a potential security issue, so everything should work basically exactly as it did in NVDA 2025.3.2. We encourage all users to update to NVDA 2025.3.3. Since there isn’t too much to say about the update, it is perhaps worth highlighting the important note we share with every release:
Restarting after updating
“Please note, after updating any software, it is a good idea to restart the computer. Restart by going to the Shutdown dialog, selecting “restart” and pressing ENTER. Updating software can change files which are in use. This can lead to instability and strange behaviour which is resolved by rebooting. This is the first thing to try if you do notice anything odd after updating.”
We do often see odd issues in between updating NVDA and the next time the PC is restarted. These might be NVDA not reading something it usually reads, or saying odd things, or keys doing unexpected things or just about anything. Why does this happen? NVDA uses a number of files which get information from various parts of the computer. When updated, sometimes these files are not fully closed, and the computer sets them aside to sort out later. This happens when the PC is next restarted, but this can mean that they don’t behave entirely as expected in the meantime. We sometimes get asked why we don’t force people to restart? We’ve considered it, and we might push more of an encouragement in future. For now, we recommend restarting as the first troubleshooting step if anything does seem slightly out of order.
Where do you get your info?
There has been a bit of conversation in the official NVDA user group at https://nvaccess.org/nvda-users about the upcoming 64-bit NVDA 2026.1. The excitement is building as more and more add-ons are updated to work with the betas (Yes! You can use that link to check which add-ons are updated already. Note that all are in “beta” or “dev” builds rather than stable until the Release Candidate comes out). This post from Rui about Tiflotecnia’s Voices add-on being updated prompted me to remind everyone that the official NVDA user group is THE place you will find NV Access staff, community developers and users discussing new features, announcements, and answering questions from each other in a friendly and helpful environment. Be sure to bookmark the page at https://nvaccess.org/nvda-users – and of course remember you can interact with the group entirely via email if you prefer. We also have a very active community on social media, particularly Mastodon – you can follow us, AND you can use the #NVDA hashtag to talk with other users about your favourite free screen reader.
#NVDA20
Speaking of hashtags, there’s a new one in town! As many know, this year marks the 20th anniversary of the NVDA screen reader. We have been considering various ways to mark the occasion, and of course, one of the most important, like the screen reader itself, is that the community is central to celebrations. This week, NVDA user Kaveinthran shared a post on Mastodon, which read:
Let’s start an #NVDA20 hashtag and tell any stories or reflect, related to the #screenReader. It can be your first encounter with the screen reader, how you fall in love with #nvda, loves, hates, what should be the next 20 years like, how we can get together to do #nvdaCon, just anything that come to your mind about the truely, Only #blind Screen Reader. Take it away folks! #NVDASR
Well there’s an invitation we couldn’t help but share! Please do share your stories using the hashtag, or if you prefer, email us at [email protected] and we look forward to sharing them!
Thank you Germany!
We are always appreciative of everyone who supports NVDA – whether as a user, a contributor, a donor, an advocate, or a combination of those. Today, we’d like to highlight the work of Rainer Brell and BFW Würzburg. They are part of the German NVDA project “NVDA nachhaltig”. As well as contributing improvements to NVDA with a particular focus on those important locally, they have also contributed financially to NV Access. We are very grateful for all their efforts and contributions, and the benefits these will have for users in Germany and around the world.
Image of the BFW NVDA Project team from the official BFW Facebook post announcing the donation, both from BFW, and from Rainer Brell. Thank you everyone!
If you’d like to donate to NV Access as well, please visit the NV Access donation page.
NVDA 2026.1 Beta 4
We are up to Beta 4 of NVDA 2026.1!
Changes introduced in Beta 4:
- Fixed eSpeak NG continuing to speak at a reduced rate after reading math if the Relative speech rate option in NVDA’s Math settings was set to anything less than 100%
- Fixed the inability to temporarily change MathCAT settings when the config directory is read-only
- The “Use NVDA during sign-in” checkbox in the installer is no-longer checked by default when performing a fresh install
- When creating a portable copy, a warning will now be shown if doing so in the chosen directory will downgrade an existing portable copy
- Updates to translations
Changes introduced in Beta 3:
- Fixed an occasional freeze with SAPI 4 and 32-bit SAPI 5 synths
- Fixed an issue which would cause NVDA to remain silent if eSpeak NG was set as the default synthesizer and failed to load when NVDA started
- Updates to translations
Note that the 2026 betas also contains the update from NVDA 2025.3.3 mentioned above.
One week with NVDA
Darrell Hilliker has used another screen reader for many years. Recently, he started a seven-day experiment to try switching to NVDA as his primary screen reader. He noted that “NVDA has always been on my radar as the powerful, free, open-source alternative. But radar is different from reality. So I dove in. One week later — and several days beyond that — I’m still running NVDA. It has become my primary Windows screen reader.” He shared his full experience on Blind Access Journal.
Many of the issues Darrell encountered, he was able to resolve himself. Some were simply slight differences between keystrokes or features. Many of these are documented in the Switching from Jaws to NVDA guide, compiled by actual NVDA users.
Some of the things Darrell noted have workarounds in NVDA add-ons. Some he listed in his post, and a couple he got stuck with which I can provide options for here:
- Keys such as control+c copy are not voiced: The ClipSpeak add-on will do this
- Using Gemini: There are several add-ons to improve the experience working with Gemini specifically, or a range of AI models
- Getting information about the current object. In NVDA, press NVDA+f1 which opens the log viewer, and also gives information about the current object
- He preferred having NVDA+control+f (NVDA’s find command) mapped to control+f. He found NVDA’s input gestures dialog to do this. It is worth noting control+f is usually the apps native find command so doing this will override that
- He would like to see a way of having the typing echo at a different speech rate to other speech. This is definitely something we would accept an issue on, and in fact, during the conversation on social media, user Amir liked the idea so much, Amir started working on his own add-on to do this
A couple of other things Darrell encountered:
All in all, it was fantastic to hear Darrell’s story, and to hear about the challenges he encountered and how he overcame them. Thanks Darrell!
That’s all for this week. Please do update to NVDA 2025.3.3 if you are using the stable builds of NVDA, or the latest NVDA 2026.1 beta if you are keen to try what is coming up in 2026.1 Remember you can subscribe to this blog (and release announcements) via email, and we’d love to see you in the official NVDA user group.