Welcome to 2026! It’s a big year for NV Access as we will be celebrating our 20th anniversary! More to come on that as we move through the year.

For all those who wrote to us over the last few weeks, I think we’ve caught up with our correspondence now. If you are still waiting on a reply for anything, please do reach out again and we’ll endeavour to get back to you as soon as possible. Work is continuing on NVDA 2026.1, and we are aiming to have a first beta out for you in the next few weeks. In the meantime, let’s have a look at what we’ve got for you today:

1. Switching from Jaws to NVDA
2. Running NVDA on a Mac
3. NVDA Shortcut
4. Achievements in 2025
5. Using Clip with the command line

Switching from Jaws to NVDA

In the last In-Process before Christmas, we shared a bunch of resources to help people with using NVDA: from the User Guide and Quick Start Guide, to our shop full of training materials like Basic Training for NVDA, to our Official English NVDA users list, international email lists, social media and more.

One resource we didn’t cover, but which is extremely helpful for users coming over from other screen readers, is the guide for “Switching from Jaws to NVDA”. It covers a lot of the “I know how to do XYZ using Jaws, how do I do it with NVDA?” questions you may have. Developed and updated by the community, it contains a wealth of information. This short guide to users from other screen readers up and running eventually inspired the Quick Start Guide to aim to get ALL new users up and running quickly.

If you are familiar with Jaws, please do check out the Switching from Jaws to NVDA guide, and do feel free to suggest improvements. We also have a guide for those more familiar with Window-Eyes.

Running NVDA on a Mac

We often get asked about making a Mac version of NVDA. NVDA needs to access many (Windows) operating system specific commands in order to get the right information to provide to users. Because of this, it would require rewriting the majority of NVDA’s code in order to make it work on any other operating system. With Mac (and iOS) specifically, those systems are locked down such that we couldn’t actually get the information we would need, even if we had the resources to work on what would essentially be a whole new version of NVDA. Given this constraint, natively, end-users are limited to the built-in VoiceOver on Mac and iOS.

Recently, in response to a question about testing on Mac in the official NVDA user email group, one of our very helpful users shared this blog post on “Accessibility Testing on Windows on Mac”. It walks through what you need to do to get Windows and NVDA running in a virtual machine on your Mac.

While we’re talking about Mac, and since we just mentioned the Switching from Jaws to NVDA guide above – if you are familiar with both NVDA and VoiceOver, and are interested in helping, we’d be happy to talk with you about creating a guide for those switching from VoiceOver to NVDA.

NVDA Shortcut

When you install NVDA, it offers to create a desktop shortcut and assign the keystroke control+alt+n to start NVDA. If you don’t do this, or if the shortcut later gets deleted, there is no inbuilt function to create a new one, but it’s something you can do yourself. Here are the steps to create a shortcut for NVDA. You can create shortcuts to programs, documents, web pages, just about anything.

To create a desktop shortcut:

1. Press the Windows key
2. Type NVDA (or any other thing you want to create a shortcut for)
3. Use the arrow keys to ensure the NVDA app is the item with focus (for NVDA it almost certainly will be, but if you want to use these steps for something else, you may need to double check)
4. Press the applications key or shift+f10 to open the context menu
5. Press down arrow once to “Open File Location” and press enter to activate that – File Explorer opens with the NVDA executable file selected
6. Press the applications key or shift+f10 to open the context menu
7. Press the up arrow once to “Show more options” then enter to show additional options
8. Press n until the focus is on “Send to“. If it doesn’t open automatically (because you have more than one item, E.G. “Edit with Notepad++” also uses n), then press enter when the focus gets to send to
9. Press d to move to “Desktop (create shortcut)” then enter to create a shortcut on the desktop

Now you have an NVDA shortcut on your desktop, you can add a shortcut key to it. That way, you can run the shortcut from anywhere, without needing to return to the desktop. To edit the shortcut to add the control+alt+n keystroke, do the following:

1. Press Windows+d to move the focus to the desktop
2. Press n to move to the NVDA shortcut
3. Press alt+enter to open the properties for the shortcut
4. Press alt+k to jump to the shortcut field
5. Press the shortcut you would like to use. If you just press a letter, e.g. n, it will suggest control+alt+letter
6. Press enter to save the shortcut

If all you really want to do is set control+alt+n as the shortcut key to start NVDA, and you don’t want a desktop shortcut, you can do that too. You can add this to the start menu item using a condensed set of the steps above:

1. Press the Windows key
2. Type NVDA
3. Use the arrow keys to ensure the NVDA app is the item with focus (for NVDA it almost certainly will be, but if you want to use these steps for something else, you may need to double check)
4. Press the applications key or shift+f10 to open the context menu
5. Press down arrow once to “Open File Location” and press enter to activate that. File Explorer opens with the NVDA executable file selected
6. Press alt+enter to open the properties for the shortcut
7. Press alt+k to jump to the shortcut field
8. Press the shortcut you would like to use. If you just press a letter, e.g. n, it will suggest control+alt+letter
9. Press enter to save the shortcut



Achievements in 2025

NVDA user Robert Astington, who is in his 90s with retinitis pigmentosa, published his debut book, “For the love of a child” in 2025. He wrote to us to share his fantastic achievement. This prompted us to wonder – What did NVDA help you achieve in 2025? We do love hearing from users and sharing your amazing stories. Let us know on social media what NVDA has helped you achieve in 2025! Or, what are you already achieving in 2026 as an NVDA user? The year is already over three weeks old, and we know a lot has been achieved already!

If you’re interested in Robert’s book, you can find it at your local bookstore, Troubador UK, Amazon, or as an eBook on all popular ebook retaillers.

Using Clip with the command line

While we’re looking at social media, here’s a tip from Jen:

“If you’re using that command line in Windows, don’t forget you can use clip to pipe the output of your command to the clipboard! Like this:

systeminfo | clip

Puts the output of the command directly on your clipboard so you don’t need to manually select and copy it.”

What quick tips have you got to share? Let us know – or use the #NVDA tag on social media to highlight your NVDA tips!

That’s all for this week. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with more. We might even be just about up to an NVDA 2026.1 beta by then – but more on that next edition!