Beta1 of NVDA 2026.3 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 using our issue reporting process. 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/RC channel will always keep you up to date with the latest NVDA version. The last RC in a release cycle is identical to the final stable release. To return to the stable release channel, upgrade manually to the latest stable build.
Links
-
Download NVDA 2026.3beta1
- SHA256 sum: 288e684536edb011710d760fc18ba7b652241085742e304e17d8ee01ede2d20f
- What’s new in this release of NVDA
- Please report any issues on GitHub.
Highlights
This release includes significant performance improvements, improvements to NVDA’s dialogs, and expanded touch screen input.
Several performance improvements have been made to reduce lag and improve responsiveness. NVDA now fetches and caches more information about controls in the background, improving performance in controls such as combo boxes and File Explorer. NVDA no longer causes File Explorer or other applications to crash when NVDA is exited or restarted. NVDA now recovers more quickly when an application stops responding, and will no longer freeze or flood the log with errors from unresponsive applications. In live text regions, such as terminals, NVDA no longer freezes when substantial amounts of text are dumped to the screen.
Context menus and keyboard shortcuts have been added to the Configuration Profiles, Input Gestures, and Speech Dictionaries dialogs, making these dialogs easier to use with the keyboard. It is also now possible to change an existing gesture directly in the Input Gestures dialog. The dialog used to present browseable messages has been modernized and now better supports resizing, maximizing, and minimizing.
Touch screen input has been significantly expanded. Sequential two-flick gestures now combine two flicks in quick succession into a single gesture, greatly increasing the number of bindable touch gestures. Edge gestures are also now supported, allowing gestures that begin within 15 mm of any screen edge to be bound independently from the same gesture performed in the center of the screen.
A new unassigned command has been added to move the mouse cursor to the center of the magnified view. Windows OCR can now be used while the Screen Curtain or NVDA’s built-in Magnifier is active.
Liblouis has been updated with new Elfdalian, Sami, Maori, New Zealand Unified English Braille, and Haitian Creole braille tables, a Norwegian table for Spanish text, and additional Swedish 6 and 8 dot variants. eSpeak NG has been updated with added support for Ligurian and Abkhaz.
