We are flying through April, and we have a big newsletter for you this week. Not least of which, as we unveil our NVDA 20 years celebratory logo!
- NVDA 20 Years
- 20 Years of NVDA Development: A Data-Driven Retrospective
- NVDA 2026.1 Beta 13
- NV Access all hands
- Selecting cells in Excel
- Subscribing via email
NVDA 20 Years
2026 marks the 20th anniversary of NVDA. To celebrate, we have a special “NVDA 20 Years” celebratory logo, which we will use on the website and in posts like this. We will continue to share updates on celebrations for the 20th anniversary of NVDA throughout the year.
The logo is the NVDA logo on the left, with a circle and text on the right, separated by a thin purple vertical line. The NVDA logo in this case is in purple on white, which differs from the notification area icon which is white on purple. You can find a description of the regular NVDA icon on the About NVDA page.
To the right of the NVDA logo is a turquoise circle outline with a smaller one inside. In-between the circles, at the top is the word “CELEBRATING” in purple. In the centre circle is “20”. To the left of the 20 (cutting through the inner circle), is the year “2006” and to the right “2026”, with all these numbers in orange. Below 20 is “YEARS” in purple, and between the circles at the bottom is the text “OF EMPOWERING LIVES” in purple.
20 Years of NVDA Development: A Data-Driven Retrospective
In looking back at the history of NVDA, one of our developers, Sean, has made an amazing analysis charting the development of NVDA over the years. “20 Years of NVDA Development: A Data-Driven Retrospective” highlights the amazing, and increasing, impact our community has on development. The achievements listed reflect the fantastic collaboration between NV Access and the community on NVDA development since the beginning. Here are just a couple of the staggeringly impressive figures in there:
- 12,000 closed issues
- 80% of issues opened between 2016 – 2023 have been closed, with 95% of issues opened before then closed
- 50% of all code contributions come from the community and there are 700+ code contributions each year, across more than 30 active contributors
- Our 73 active translators work hard – between them, they translated over 1.4 million words in 2025
“20 Years of NVDA Development: A Data-Driven Retrospective” contains a lot more information and is a great read. What is your favourite statistic?
Meanwhile, Joseph Lee also posted a callout for thoughts and reminiscences in this GitHub discussion. I thought it was fitting that it took the neat round #20,000. Our community developers will be familiar with “pull requests” – the GitHub feature which allows you to submit code to be used in NVDA. Many of our end users will be familiar with “Issues“, since that’s how we track bugs and feature requests. If you haven’t used GitHub’s “discussions” feature before, it is where you can put forward comments, suggestions and thoughts around the project, without it yet having a specific resolution in mind. In fact, discussions are perfect for when you broadly have an idea in mind, but want to flesh it out before creating an issue. It is similar to discussing a topic in the NVDA user’s email group. The advantage of GitHub discussions is that all the developers are there, who may not be active in the user group, and because it is already part of GitHub, it can be that little bit easier to move things across to an issue when appropriate. The NVDA user’s email group is still the most appropriate place for general discussion and “How do I do XYZ with NVDA?” questions, but it’s worth being aware of GitHub discussions as well.
Meanwhile, if you read Sean’s development history, you will note that we have 12,000 closed issues and 2,100 open issues. If you are wondering how that fits in with if you open a new issue, it will be numbered 20,000+, there is a logical reason: GitHub increments the number for every issue, PR, and discussion. If you add ALL of the open and closed issues, PRs and discussions, you’ll find we’ve just tipped over 20,000 combined. Yes, you can go back and see Issue #1: “sapi4activeVoice and sapi4serotek do not always handle interruptive messages properly”. That issue was opened in 2007 and closed in 2009 – On GitHub it appears to have been opened in 2010, since that’s when we migrated to that platform. and it shows as being closed in 2015 since that’s when we started using the “milestones” feature for releases.
NVDA 2026.1 Beta 13
We’ve been averaging two betas in between our fortnightly In-Process blogs recently, but this time we have – THREE new betas – but rest assured we are near the end of the beta cycle. We are currently in the “Translation string freeze” – which means we aren’t making any changes to the “strings” (the messages NVDA reads, text in settings dialogs, etc) and translators are currently finalizing their translations to be incorporated in the “Release Candidate” shortly. For now: Changes introduced in Beta 13:
- Fixed virus scan results being unavailable for installed add-ons.
Note: This affects newly installed add-ons. Virus scan results are still unavailable for add-ons installed in previous versions of NVDA - Updates to translations
Changes introduced in Beta 12:
- Fixed spelling error reporting in Microsoft Word when accessed via the object model
- Fixed the Add-on Store failing to open in some circumstances
- Updates to translations
Changes introduced in Beta 11:
- Removed the “Automatic” language option from MathCAT’s speech settings
- Fixed a bug which prevented reopening the Add-on Store between installing an add-on and restarting NVDA
- Fixed an issue which caused math reading to fail if using the MultiLang add-on with “Relative speech rate” set to anything other than 100%
- Fixed NVDA erroneously announcing the end of spelling or grammar errors in speech when configured to only show them in braille
- Clarified the option to used Microsoft Word’s or Outlook’s math support instead of MathCAT
- Various corrections to documentation
- Updates to translations
We’ve had a couple of questions asking “Is this the highest number of betas for a release?” – Great question! The answer is…. it’s a tie! NVDA 2024.1 also got to 13 betas. As previously noted, we are nearly at the end of the translation string freeze, so are hopeful of having the “Release Candidate” build out shortly.
NV Access all hands
NV Access is having an “All hands” meeting this week. This is an important chance for both the staff and directors of NV Access to meet in person, and plan some of the high-level goals of the organisation. As a registered charity, NV Access is overseen by a board of directors, and this catch up is a great chance to share feedback on the direction of the organisation.
So, if you write to us over the next week, it may take slightly longer to reply. In the meantime, if you encounter any issues with the latest NVDA 2026.1 beta, please file a GitHub issue in the first instance. Or, ask for help in the NVDA Users email group. If you need to write to us about the beta, or anything else urgent, please ensure you use a clear subject line (mention the beta you are using etc).
Selecting cells in Excel
Just before we release NVDA 2026.1, I thought I’d take a look back at one small update in NVDA 2025.3 we haven’t mentioned, which you may find useful.
“When the selection covers more than one cell in Microsoft Excel, pressing tab or enter to move the active cell now reports the new active cell rather than the whole selection.”
In Excel, you can select cells in a number of ways:
- As you move, with tab, enter or the arrow keys, the current cell is reported, and that cell is “selected”
- If you’d like to select multiple cells, you can hold down shift as you move between cells. Shift+right arrow selects this cell and one cell to the right. Shift+down arrow selects this cell and the next one down
- If you press shift+right arrow to select multiple cells and then press shift+down arrow to select multiple cells down, Excel will select cells in a rectangle. So if you select B3, B4 and B5 with shift+right arrow, then press shift+down arrow, the block from B3 to C5 will be selected (B3, B4, B5, C3, C4 and C5)
- You can select an entire row with shift+spacebar
- You can select an entire column with control+spacebar
- Pressing control+a selects a block of cells as far as there is data (if you have data in a1, a2 and a4, pressing control+a from A2 will first select a1 and a2, then press it again and it will select everything
Once you have multiple cells selected, you can press tab to move between all the cells which are selected, moving left to right then top to bottom. If you press enter, it moves top to bottom then left to right through the selection. While on a cell, you can edit it as you otherwise would. The change in NVDA 2025.3 and later, is that as you move, NVDA will now report the cell the focus has moved to.
Subscribing via email
As many of you know, you can receive these blog posts, and our release announcements, beta information, and other organisational news via email. Indeed, many of you may be reading this as an email now.
As well as a reminder of that, I wanted to give a shout out to one of our users, George, who always prompts me, if I ever forget to hit send on some of those emails. Plus, it was George’s birthday a couple of days ago, so a very Happy Birthday to you George!
That’s all for this week. The translation string freeze is due to end shortly (Betas 12 and 13 haven’t affected that). So do try NVDA 2026.1 Beta 13 now, then be sure to check out the Release Candidate when it comes out. We will be back in early May with more on NVDA 2026.1.