Here’s an inspiring testimonial from one of our user’s, George. It’s quick, and shows what an amazing impact access can provide:
My name is George, and I’m writing from Canada. I have autism with developmental delay, and I’ve been a dedicated NVDA user since 2015 – so Congratulations on 20 years!
I first heard about NVDA through my friend Jacob, who suggested I give it a try. At the time I was using another screen reader at school, but I’d never purchased it myself because of the high cost. Once I started using NVDA, I realised it was a much better fit. Not only is it free and accessible, but it lets me do things I couldn’t do with other screen readers. One of my favourite aspects is the variety of speech synthesizers created by the community – that kind of flexibility is a huge advantage.
Outside of my computer, I spend my time playing piano and working on becoming a good musician. I also like to play the drums and guitar as well sometimes in my free time.
I also appreciate the open nature of the NVDA project. Whenever I find a bug or have an idea for a new feature, I head to GitHub and open an issue to help improve the software. NVDA has made a massive difference in my life over the last decade – thanks for everything you do to keep it running.
Wow, thank you George!
It’s fitting that George noted the 20th anniversary of NVDA. In our In-Process blog earlier this year we highlighted the milestone ourselves. In that edition, we also took the opportunity to give George a shout out. George has been a big fan of receiving our posts via email. He is also very helpful in picking up when something is missed, or doesn’t look right. Did you know you can get our posts via email? You can sign up to our emails here, and you can choose what you’d like to receive. You can receive user stories like this, notice of new NVDA releases, the blog, and more.
George also mentioned the wide variety of options for speech synthesizers. Our amazing community have curated a whole page listing speech synthesizers you might be interested in trying!
And George also highlighted how easy it is to create issues on GitHub. What can you file an issue for? Anything which might improve NVDA! It might be a report about something not working like it should. It could be a new feature or improvement to a feature. You might even want to let us know about a security vulnerability. We don’t get too many of those, but we definitely want to know if you do find one, and we have a formal process for security reports too.
Do you have a story to share? It doesn’t have to be long; we’d love to hear from you!
