Welcome to November! In this edition, we have a new release, one of our superstar users is on TV, and we share tips about profiles, gestures and keystrokes:
- NVDA 2025.3.1
- Reece gets Behind the News with Audio Description
- Manual configuration profiles
- Featured add-on: “Check Input Gestures”
- Bonus tip: Report keystroke
NVDA 2025.3.1
Since the last post, we’ve released NVDA 2025.3.1. As noted last time around, this is a patch release to fix a security issue and a bug. We encourage all users to upgrade to this version. Read the full details and download at the NVDA 2025.3.1 Release Announcement.
As we move towards the latter part of the year, we are not slowing down, but rather concentrating all our energy on development of NVDA 2026.1. In the meantime, do update to this last NVDA 2025.x release and do keep reporting any issues you encounter with it. We recently included articles on how to search for issues on GitHub, and how to report issues on GitHub and of course, the official NVDA user group is a great place to get support if you aren’t sure if something is a bug or just a feature you aren’t familiar with. If you would like to improve your skills with NVDA, now is a great time! After reading the quick start guide in the User Guide, do jump over and check out Basic Training for NVDA in our shop.
Reece gets Behind the News with Audio Description
We love hearing from users. We recently received an email from Reece, and 11-year-old primary school student who uses NVDA. He is smart at technology and told us about his cool desktop PC at home. He appreciates NVDA because it is free and “really nice and user friendly” and wanted to thank us for creating it. He also enjoyed the Australian Story episode we featured in, and we were excited to hear that Reece is also a television star. He watches “Behind the News” (BTN) at school. “BTN is an educational news program aimed at 10–13-year-old kids. It unpacks and explains news and current affairs to young people in a dynamic and creative way.” The show has been on air in Australia for over 57 years. Reece emailed the show requesting that they add audio description to describe what is happening to blind viewers. Not only did they oblige, but they also ran a segment on Reece and how he uses technology at school. It’s a fantastic clip and Reece sent us a link to it.
We are sure this won’t be the last we hear of Reece. It is fantastic to see someone advocating for what they need. And such a presence on screen, what a superstar! And thanks heaps for writing to us Reece! If you would like to share your story with us, we would love to hear from you!
Manual configuration profiles
We’ve previously looked at setting a program specific profile – a group of NVDA settings only used in a particular program. That is one of the most common uses of NVDA’s configuration profiles. We’ve also covered setting a “Say all” profile, which controls how NVDA works when you press NVDA+down arrow (or NVDA+a if using Laptop keyboard layout) to read. Today, let’s have a look at manual profiles, including setting keystrokes to activate them. This is a powerful way of quickly switching between NVDA on demand.
Creating Profiles
Let’s walk through creating a couple of profiles. We’ll create a “Skim reading” profile with faster reading and minimal punctuation. We’ll also create a “Proof reading” profile with more punctuation and slower reading.- Press NVDA+control+p to open NVDA’s profiles dialog
- Press alt+n to create a new profile
- Type “Proof reading” for the name and press enter
- A dialog notes that “To edit this profile, you will need to manually activate it. Once you have finished editing, you will need to deactivate it to resume normal usage. Do you wish to manually activate it now?”
- Press enter to activate the new profile
- Press NVDA+control+down arrow to slow the speech rate
- Press NVDA+p to set symbol level to all
- Press NVDA+control+p to open the profile dialog again
- Press enter to deactivate the proof reading profile
Repeat the steps above to create a second profile. At step 3, call the profile “skim reading“. At step 6, increase the speech rate and at step 7 set the symbol level to none. Now we have two new profiles. These can be manually activated and deactivated in the profile dialog.
Assigning Keystrokes to Profiles
In everyday use, it will be much quicker to use these profiles if we assign a keystroke to each. Let’s use the Input gestures dialog to do that:
- Press NVDA+n to open the NVDA menu
- Press p for preferences, then n for “Input Gestures“
- Press down arrow to “Configuration profiles“
- Press the right arrow to expand this category
- Press down arrow to “Activates or deactivates the proof reading configuration profile” option
- Press alt+a to add a gesture to this function
- Press NVDA+alt+1 then enter to assign this keystroke
- Repeat steps 3-6 to set NVDA+alt+2 for the “skim reading” profile
- Press enter to close the dialog
Using Profiles with Keystrokes
Now, let’s use the profiles in practise:
- Open notepad and type a sentence
- Press NVDA+alt+1 to activate the “proof reading” profile
- Press NVDA+up arrow (Laptop: NVDA+L) to read the current line
- Press control+home then control+right arrow to move through the text one word at a time
- Press NVDA+alt+2 to activate the “skim reading” profile
- Press NVDA+up arrow (Laptop: NVDA+L) to read the current line quickly
- Press control+home then control+right arrow to quickly move through the text one word at a time
- Press NVDA+alt+2 to deactivate the “skim reading” profile
Featured add-on: “Check Input Gestures”
Since we’ve just been using Input Gestures for configuration profiles, this seems a timely one. When you assign an input gesture to something, there is, by default, no check done to ensure it doesn’t conflict with anything. There is an issuing requesting such a check (Do comment on that issue if you can add more detail), but in the meantime, the “Check Input Gestures” add-on will alert you if there are any conflicts. The check input gestures add-on is available from NVDA’s add-on store.
Bonus tip: Report keystroke
And while we’re looking at keystrokes, here’s a handy keystroke built into NVDA. When you are on a control, such as a ribbon item or a checkbox in a dialog, press shift+numpad 2 (laptop: NVDA+control+shift+dot) to have NVDA report the keystroke associated with that control. For instance, if I open the home ribbon in Word, and tab to the “Copy” button. Press that keystroke, and NVDA will report: “ALT, H, C, 1, Ctrl+C“
That is, from your document in Word, you can press alt, then h, then c, then 1 to copy the selected text via the ribbon option. OR you can press control+c. It may not list every possible keystroke in every instance, but it can be handy to reinforce what is available.
That’s all for this week. Do update to NVDA 2025.3.1 if you haven’t already. Do also keep the conversation going in the official NVDA user group. What do you use configuration profiles for? And what keystrokes do you use for them? Or is it something you’re about to try after reading this? We’d love to hear how you go!