The World Blind Union General Assembly and World Blindness Summit (WBU GA & WBS) was held in São Paulo Brazil, from 1 – 5 September 2025. NV Access director, Emma Bennison, and General Manager, James Boreham, were invited to not only attend, but present in several sessions.
The event was recorded and we have it available on our YouTube channel. We made two versions for you – one is a 4 minute “digest” version of some of the highlights:
The other is the full, unedited, 16-minute presentation:
Whichever version you watch, we recommend staying until the end, as the chant of “NVDA! NVDA! NVDA!” is incredible, and unprompted! For the presentation itself, we created a page of the WBU slides. We’ve also included the transcript of the full version below for you to read:
A panel from The World Blind Union General Assembly and World Blindness Summit in São Paulo Brazil September 2025. Speakers in order are James Boreham, General Manager and Emma Bennison, Director, from NV Access Visuals are of the presenters with occasional panning around the seated crowd of approximately 14 rows of 12 chairs, all full.
(cheering and clapping Introduction in Brazilian Portuguese)
James: Thank you Simone, can you hear me ok? Yes? (Affirmative replies from the crowd) Good afternoon, Ola. Thank you for the opportunity to present today. We will be presenting in English, Australian English. Some people might say that’s not really English but we’ll do our best. My name is James Boreham, I’m General Manager from NV Access. Together with Emma Bennison, director at NV Access, we will be speaking about NVDA, a resilient movement and how community powered access is fostering global inclusion. So we’re talking about a practical application of what the previous three speakers have spoken about. This is a practical application of their theory and practice requirements.
NV Access was founded by blind people, and is the Australian registered charity that develops, maintains and distributes the free and open-source NVDA screen reader. A full digital copy of the presentation that is accessible, is available from www.nvaccess.org/wbu. Next slide please.
So, The shared challenge: A global digital divide. The digital world offers immense opportunity, but access is not equal. Cost and availability lock millions out of education and employment. Next slide please.
Emma: So to address this challenge, NV Access proposes a different approach, and it’s the approach we’ve been talking about throughout this panel: Technology as a right, not a luxury. Our software, NVDA, is a professional-grade screen reader that is always free. NVDA is open-source, promoting global collaboration, and NVDA is community powered. This model is built on the core principle of our community: “Nothing about us without us”. Vision-impaired and blind individuals are our users, as well as our designers, developers and testers and NV Access directors. By the blind, for the blind, means solutions are built from lived experience. Empowering local leaders: we provide the tool, communities create the change on the ground
James: next slide please. So before we talk about the movement, I want to make sure that everyone is familiar with the tool that started it all. The title of our talk is: NVDA, which stands for Non-Visual Desktop Access So what is it? In simple terms, NVDA is a powerful, free and open-source screen reader for Windows. It gives a voice to the computer, allowing a blind or vision-impaired person to navigate the digital world. It reads what’s on the screen.
Ok, it gives a voice to the computer, allowing a blind or vision-impaired person to navigate the digital world. It reads what’s on the screen from the name of an icon, to the text of a document, and speaks it through a synthesized voice, or outputs it to a refreshable braille display. I want to highlight four things that make NVDA different. First, it is completely free for anyone anywhere. So, a student in Sao Paulo, has the same access as a government worker in Geneva. This removes the significant financial barrier that often locks people out of education and employment.
Second: It is globally accessible. Thanks to our incredible community of volunteers, NVDA speaks over 55 languages. I don’t speak 55 languages, some people say I don’t even speak one. But it’s thanks to our fantastic community of volunteers that we can achieve this. This ensures that a user’s access to technology is not limited by their native language. NVDA is now used in 175 countries across the world. You’ll be happy to know, Brazil, and also India, are among our highest-using countries. We also have users in countries such as Somalia, Chad, Vietnam, Samoa, Kazakhstan, Hungary and Egypt, just to name a few.
Third: Free does not mean basic. NVDA provides access to the most essential tools people need today. Browsing the web, writing emails, working with documents and so much more.
And finally, and most importantly for our talk today, NVDA is community-driven. This isn’t software handed down from a corporation. It is built by and for the community it serves. This ensures it meets the real-world needs of its users. This combination of being free, global and powerful is what makes NVDA a catalyst for change. And that brings us to the global challenge we are all here to address. Next slide please.
The power of community: A global network, and a sustainable model. The NVDA movement is powered by three groups working together. Firstly, NV Access, a non-profit, provides the core team for stable development and professional training. We are supported by a network of global developers who volunteer their expertise to innovate. Most importantly, our community of hundreds of thousands of users, provide invaluable feedback. Local translation and peer support, this model has a multiplier effect whereby blind people have learnt NVDA, then they have taught others in their community how to use NVDA and then they have contributed code and made suggestions to improve NVDA.
NVDA is a community multiplier, whereby we have empowered blind and vision impaired people around the world. and this brings me to a crucial point about our model’s sustainability and impact. We made a conscious choice, not to charge for every copy of NVDA. To charge would create barriers. Instead, we ask organisations and individuals to fund our central development work. This is a far smarter investment.
When a corporation, a government or a foundation funds a new feature, they are funding it for every single NVDA user in the world, for free, forever. Think about the scale of that, by funding the core, rather than needlessly funding or charging per copy. This model has already resulted in massive collective savings for individuals, governments, charities and businesses worldwide, easily amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars. That is money that can be reinvested into training, employment and other vital services for the blind community. It is money better spent elsewhere, and invested elsewhere.
At this point I’d like to mention that partner with Microsoft, Google and Adobe. We work with them, and they also sponsor us on an ongoing basis. To make sure that NVDA works with their operating systems and their software, and they want to make sure that what they do and what they develop works in advance with NVDA. We meet and consult with them very regularly. So, this is what makes our movement so resilient. It is not just about free software. It’s about building a more efficient and equitable system for digital access. Next slide please.
Emma: So, I want to talk now about the impact. The impact of this model is profound. Because NVDA is free, if students have access to a computer, they can access digital learning opportunities. NVDA gives jobseekers a professional-level tool to compete in the modern workforce. And outside of work, NVDA helps individual to gain full control over their digital lives.
And I just want to share a story – sorry can we move to the next slide please. I just wanted to share a quick story about my experience with NVDA. I think I was one of those people initially who thought NVDA was free and therefore basic and I was pretty unsure initially about whether NVDA would actually meet my needs, particularly in the workplace. But I’m one of those people who benefited from peer support, because I had a friend and a colleague who I was working with at the time whose views I trusted and who convinced me to give NVDA a try. He was using it exclusively for work and personal needs, and he was loving it and so having experienced no end of frustration with licensing problems with other screen readers and trying to install other screen readers on my computer, I decided to give it a try, and once I did I quickly became a convert, and there are a few reasons why Firstly because of productivity. I found it performed as well if not better than other screen readers for workplace use. It was more responsive and crashed less often, making me much more productive. The second thing was choice. I could install it anywhere without the hassle of licensing and that gave me the freedom to use any computer that I wanted to and also to help sighted friends and colleagues with their technical challenges. Not that I’m a particularly technical person, so that didn’t always go very well.
And the third thing for me was values alignment. And that’s because I believe that all blind people should have access to a freely-available powerful screen reader, whether they use it for work, life admin, study or entertainment. The fact that NVDA is developed by blind people for blind people is really important to me because I believe passionately in the value of blind leadership and I believe passionately in the benefit of peer support. Both values embodied by NV Access and the reason I am so privileged and very proud to be a director of this organisation.
James: Thanks Emma, next slide please. So, Join the movement: A call to action for leaders. We are not here to sell a product. We are here to promote a philosophy of access. You, you as leaders in the global blind community. You are in a unique position to champion this cause. We invite you to become an advocate for a more inclusive world. In government and policy, advocate, speak for, the inclusion of free and open-source assistive technology in public policy. Champion the creation of sustainable, national-level support systems Emma: In education, integrate NVDA into your technology curriculum to empower the next generation with essential skills. In your community, amplify this message, be a local voice for access and help us with translation and localisation to ensure that everyone can participate in their own language. Next slide please. So, let’s continue the conversation.
The movement for global inclusion is built on collaboration. We want to work with you to understand the needs of your community and build a more accessible future together. We invite you to collaborate with us. You can contact us and connect with us via email. You can download and explore NVDA for free from the NV Access website www.nvaccess.org/download. You can also visit our website. www.nvaccess.org for all the information about NVDA. And as I mentioned, a copy of the presentation is available from www.nvaccess.org/wbu. That’s got our contact details in it if you need to refer to that if you want to reach out. We’d love to hear from you, have a conversation.
We can start a conversation that can always lead to bigger things. So, thank you for the opportunity to present today. Obrigado.
(Cheering and clapping) NVDA! NVDA! NVDA! NVDA! NVDA! NVDA! NVDA! NVDA! NVDA! NVDA! NVDA! NVDA!