NVDA 2024.2beta3 available for testing

Beta3 of NVDA 2024.2 is now available for download and testing. For anyone who is interested in trying out what the next version of NVDA has to offer before it is officially released, we welcome you to download the beta and provide feedback. By installing the beta you will be opting into NVDA’s beta channel, and will only receive update notifications for beta and release candidate (RC) builds. The beta channel will always keep you up to date with latest NVDA version, where the latest RC build will be identical to the latest stable build if no newer RC is available. To return to the stable release channel, upgrade manually to the latest stable build.

Links

Highlights

There is a new feature called sound split. This allows splitting NVDA sounds into one channel (e.g. left) while sounds from all other applications are directed to the other channel (e.g. right).

There are new commands for modifying the synth settings ring, allowing users to jump to the first or last setting, and to increase or decrease the current setting in larger steps. There are also new quick navigation commands, allowing users to bind gestures to quickly jump between: paragraph, vertically aligned paragraph, same style text, different style text, menu item, toggle button, progress bar, figure, and math formula.

There are many new braille features and bug fixes. A new braille mode called “display speech output” has been added. When active, the braille display shows exactly what NVDA speaks. Support was also added for the BrailleEdgeS2 and BrailleEdgeS3 displays. LibLouis was updated, adding new detailed (with capital letters indicated) Belarusian and Ukrainian Braille tables, a Lao table, and a Spanish table for reading Greek texts.

eSpeak was updated, adding new language Tigrinya.

There are many minor bug fixes for applications, such as Thunderbird, Adobe Reader, web browsers, Nudi and Geekbench.

Changes introduced in Beta 3:

  • Disable style navigation in Microsoft Word
  • Add section on Add-on Store to Quick Start Guide
  • Fixes for using Poedit with all plural forms
  • Minor fixes for sound split
  • Minor documentation fixes
  • Updates to translations

Changes introduced in Beta 2:

  • Disable style navigation in Outlook and non-UIA Word
  • Disable vertical, style and text QuickNav commands in Kindle
  • Minor documentation fixes
  • Updates to translations

NVDA logo on a purple background