August 25, 2026 9:04 am

We’re so close to 2026.2 now! We have a release candidate! Plus, this time around:

1. NVDA 2026.2 Release Candidate!
2. Automatically Scrolling the Braille Display
3. Getting help from others
4. New Unassigned Commands
5. Finding out more about what is new

NVDA 2026.2 Release Candidate!

The NVDA 2026.2 Release Candidate is now available for testing! We encourage all users to download this RC and provide feedback. Unless any critical bugs are found, this will be identical to the final 2026.2 release.

NVDA 2026.2 includes:

• Magnifier (full screen, colour filtering, zoom, focus tracking)
• Improved touch gestures (links, form fields, etc)
• NVDA+x to repeat last spoken information
• Improved speech dictionaries
• Automatic Braille Display scrolling
• & much more!

We would encourage you to try out the NVDA 2026.2 Release Candidate, especially if you haven’t yet tried any of the betas. You can do this by creating a portable copy or by selecting “Continue running” from the launcher, to run a temporary copy and not interfere with your installed copy of NVDA.

Automatically Scrolling the Braille Display

One of the new features in NVDA 2026.2, is that we: “Added the ability to automatically scroll the braille display”. This comes courtesy of Noelia, one of our prominent Spanish contributors. Reading the user guide entry for the new “Automatic scroll rate” feature, it notes:

Automatic braille scrolling can be enabled to scroll the display at a set speed. When using this feature, the braille display scrolls to present information which is more than will fit on the display at once. The feature is disabled by default. You can change the gestures assigned to use automatic braille scrolling in NVDA’s Input Gestures dialog before it can be used. Gestures are also available to speed up or slow down the rate of automatic scrolling. Alternatively, you can set the automatic scroll rate in Braille Settings.

While braille is scrolling, you can still use the scroll back and scroll forward commands without stopping scrolling. Scroll back can be useful to read previous contents again. Scroll forward can be useful to skip a blank line, or if the line being read is short.

While reading, automatic braille scrolling will stop when any of the following happen:

• The toggle automatic braille scrolling key is pressed
• The user presses a key or gesture which would display a new message
• The focus is moved (including with braille display panning keys)
• The end of the document is reached
• The state of the lock or secure screen is changed (such as the computer being locked)

The commands for this feature are:

• Toggle automatic scroll: NVDA+alt+k
• Increase automatic scroll: NVDA+alt+L
• Decrease automatic scroll: NVDA+alt+j

Getting help from others

Last fortnight, we covered ways you can get help from within NVDA itself. This time around, let’s have a look at some of the places you can get help from others. As with last fortnight’s post, this list covers getting help for NVDA itself only, aimed at end users:

• NV Access Telephone Support: If you’ve still got questions after following last fortnight’s tips and reading Basic Training for NVDA etc, give us a call. Telephone support IS a paid service, and for end-user support only, but it is available 24/7. We have numbers you can call in Australia or the USA, OR you can email us and we can call you anywhere in the world. You also get telephone support included with the NVDA Productivity Bundle.
• Official NVDA Email Group: While we monitor various other groups, the one place you know you will find NV Access staff, and users, is the official, friendly, NVDA email group at https://nvaccess.org/nvda-users – plus, as a free, welcoming and popular resource, you will often get help from other users even quicker than we can respond.
• Local language email groups: We have a huge list of email groups in many languages. Know of a group which isn’t listed? Please, let us know so we can share it on the connect page for others!
• Social media: Our community on Mastodon is the most active, but you can also find us on Facebook and other platforms.
• NVDA Remote Access: Have a friend who can help with your PC? You can let them connect to your PC to help you. Note there are a number of security measures in place to ensure this feature can only be accessed by deliberate action from both parties.

New Unassigned Commands

For the upcoming NVDA 2026.2, we’ve added a couple of new “unassigned” commands. These aren’t always the most obvious to find, so I thought it was worth highlighting them here:

• Added an unassigned command to toggle keyboard layout. (#19211, @CyrilleB79)
• Added an unassigned Quick Navigation Command for jumping to next/previous slider in browse mode. (#17005, @tareh7z)
• Added an unassigned command to report the current status of the Screen Curtain. (#19759)

Commands like these can provide useful functionality, but may often only be required by some users. As we are all aware, screen readers already have a lot of keystrokes, so we always have to think carefully before assigning new keystrokes.

For instance, the toggle keyboard layout setting. Most users will setup the keyboard layout how they prefer, and never need to change it. For the rare time you may wish to change it, the setting is on the keyboard settings page, which is available with NVDA+control+k. For testing or teaching, a command to toggle the layout on the fly may be invaluable, so, in NVDA 2026.2, it’s there if you need it.

Finding out more about what is new

In any NVDA release announcement, there is a link to “What’s new in this release of NVDA” (I’ve linked to those to things for NVDA 2026.2 RC1). That document gives a summary of the highlights in several paragraphs, and then bullet points for all the changes in groups:

• Important notes: information such as older Windows versions no longer supported
• Security fixes: Updates to NVDA which fix potential security issues.
• New features: New functionality in NVDA. For instance, NVDA+x to repeat the last spoken information, or the ability to automatically scroll the braille display
• Changes: Features which may be slightly different, such as renaming the “COM Registration Fixing Tool” to “System Accessibility Repair Tool”.
• Bug fixes: Fixing features which didn’t work the way they should. For instance, in NVDA 2026.2, we’ve fixed a crash in the add-on store, NVDA now recovers quicker from freezes in some applications, and form controls are correctly reported in Firefox again.
• Changes for developers: Updates which may affect how contributors code for NVDA. These don’t affect end users directly. For instance, updating the version of Python used, or new functions developers can call to find out information.
• Deprecations: Again, only for developers, function calls which either no longer work, or have been changed to something else, and developers should transition over to the new function call.

In most of the bullet points for each release, there is a number at the end, and sometimes a username. For instance, in the unassigned commands article above: “Added an unassigned Quick Navigation Command for jumping to next/previous slider in browse mode. (#17005, @tareh7z)”

In this case, #17005 is the issue number assigned to the original request for this feature. @tareh7z is the GitHub user who wrote the code and submitted the pull request to fix it – thanks @tareh7z! And thanks to ALL our contributors. NVDA 2026.2 is a big release with a lot of amazing features the community have put a lot of work into!

The line in the changes document will hopefully give enough information to quickly describe the feature for most users. The user guide will also have been updated with any relevant information. In this case, look at section 6.1.3 “Other Navigation Commands”, which talks about not only sliders, but other quick navigation commands which don’t have default keystrokes.

The issue number is a link back to that issue, which can be helpful if you’d like to look back at the conversation which prompted the new feature. For instance, in this case, there was some discussion around what other types of information could potentially be accessed with a “slider” command (others that were suggested were ruled out in this case).

That’s all for this time. Do please try out the NVDA 2026.2 release candidate, and of course, let us know of any issues you encounter with it. Next time around we will have more on NVDA 2026.2!