September 17, 2025 11:00 am

It’s new release week! Yes, NVDA 2025.3 is in the wild. But you probably already knew that, right? Especially if you are subscribed to get notifications about new releases of NVDA. Let’s see what else we’ve got this week:

1. NVDA 2025.3 Released
2. Fixes and Stability
3. Using Chromium with the mouse
4. World Blind Union
5. Something Digital
6. Using Single Letter Navigation with web apps

NVDA 2025.3 Released

NVDA 2025.3 is here, and you can download it now!

This release includes improvements to Remote Access, SAPI5 voices, braille and the Add-on Store.

Add-ons in the Add-on Store can now be sorted by minimum/last tested NVDA version and install date.

Remote Access has had several minor fixes and improvements including adding a command to send control+alt+delete and remembering recent connection settings. There are also fixes for connection and audio issues.

Braille improves with smarter word wrap, stable table selection across language changes, and optional USB auto-detection for Dot Pad.

There are several bug fixes for SAPI5 voices, including fixes for excessive leading silence trimming, freezing issues, and audio gaps.

eSpeak NG and Unicode CLDR have been updated. Localisation data for emojis has been added for Belarusian and Bosnian.

As always, we recommend restarting after updating NVDA. 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 notice anything odd after updating.

Read the full what’s new and download NVDA 2025.3 from the release announcement here.

Fixes and Stability

We’ve put a lot of work this release into fixes and stability.

We’ve particularly worked on stability of synthesizers, especially SAPI 5, but also improving trimming of silence and gaps in speech, and a bug where Eloquence wouldn’t start.

Braille has a number of changes: when braille word wrap is enabled, all braille cells will be used if the next character is a space, it no longer resets braille tables when changing language, improvements to dot pad detection and a fix for reading Turkish Grade 1.

There have been a lot of improvements in NVDA Remote Access, including remembering the most recent connection details, fixing a bug which stopped speech when the controlled computer had no audio output configured, and one which stopped Remote Access working if a session was interrupted while connecting to the server.

What’s your favourite fix in NVDA 2025.3? Do let us know! Or, is there an issue which is still a bugbear, and you’d like to see fixed? Be sure you follow the tips from the blog recently to ensure it is reported on GitHub, so it can get attention!

Using Chromium with the mouse

In recent builds of Chromium there have been some accessibility regressions, particularly affecting mouse users trying to hover over information and have NVDA read it to you. Because it is a Chromium bug, it affects recent builds of Chrome, Edge and other chromium-based browsers such as Brave and Vivaldi. This has been reported to Chromium, but we do not have a timeline for a fix from them. In the meantime, there is no workaround on Chromium, however Firefox is not affected and is worth considering. It is often useful having several browsers installed in any case, as sometimes a particular page will work better in one than another. Most browsers, including Firefox and Chrome, also have options to import your bookmarks etc from other browsers which can enable you to quickly switch between them.

Note: Downgrading your Chromium browser to a build prior to the change may also be a temporary workaround (before version 140 for Chrome). This may require some technical knowledge, so please refer to your browser documentation for instructions.

World Blind Union

Recently, NV Access Director Emma Bennison and General Manager James Boreham attended the World Blind Union General Assembly and World Blindness Summit in São Paulo, Brazil. The week was extremely productive with the pair presenting in two sessions and meeting many people from Brazil, South America and around the world who had travelled to the event.

James and Emma also visited Laramara, a local blindness agency we look forward to sharing more with you about in upcoming In-Process posts.

The pair presented a session on “NVDA, A Global and Resilient Movement: Community-Driven Access to Digital Inclusion“. The slides are available online. James and Emma’s presentation was part of a wider session called “Digital Access for All – Creating Inclusive Information Space”.

Something Digital

NV Access Founder, Mick Curran and Chief Technology Officer, Gerald Hartig, recently attended the Something Digital conference in Brisbane, Australia. Something Digital was created in 2018 to bring Queensland’s digital community together and strengthen our city’s digital innovation ecosystem.

Whilst technology is key to solving complex problems, it is the digital piece that transforms tech into human centred platforms that can be used, marketed and sold. Digital innovation is the bridge between technology and humanity.

Mick was part of a panel on the topic “From voice interfaces to micro-interactions: The innovations powering digital accessibility”. This panel dived into the innovations making a real difference, like micro-interactions, adaptive design, and inclusive communication and how we can design for digital inclusion that goes beyond compliance.

Using Single Letter Navigation with web apps

Web applications are becoming increasingly complex. From the number of features available in your favourite social media platform, to writing complex spreadsheets in your browser in Google Sheets or Excel online. To help you navigate this complexity quickly, many of these online applications provide their own keystrokes. For instance, on most social media platforms, you can press “j” to move to the previous post, and “k” to move to the next one. Except, by default, when you press “k” to go to the next post, NVDA will instead jump to the next LINK, since that’s what “k” does in NVDA’s single letter navigation.

The good news is you can easily have the best of both worlds. Press NVDA+shift+spacebar to toggle NVDA’s built in single letter navigation on or off. Turn it off, so you can use a web application’s own keys. Turn it back on to use NVDA’s again.

That’s all for this week. Do download NVDA 2025.3 if you haven’t already, and be sure to join in the conversation in the NVDA user group.