Welcome to the Home of NVDA
NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) is a free and open source screen reader for the Microsoft Windows operating system. This software can enable blind or vision impaired people to access computers running Windows for no more cost than a sighted person.
NVDA allows the user to find out what is happening on the screen by querying the Operating system and using a speech synthesizer to output the information.
For more information about the project, visit the About section.
Check out the Download section if you would like to obtain a copy.
For information about email lists, the NVDA IRC chat channel and links to community sites written in other languages, take a look at the Community section.
For documentation about NVDA, visit the Documentation section.
For information on how to report bugs, feature requests, etc., please see ReportingIssues.
If you wish to contribute to the project, please consider making a Donation to NV Access.
NVDA is still very much in development. It may contain bugs and not be as stable as other commercial screen readers. However, even though it may not work correctly in every situation, people are reporting that NVDA works well for basic computing tasks, and definitly has the potential to grow in to something as usable as the commercial screen readers.
Contacting the Developers
To contact the developers of NVDA, please send us an email at: developers@nvda-project.org. However, we do ask that before asking questions, you do take a look around the website (wiki, email list archives etc) to see if your question has already been answered.
News
NVDA 0.6p2 released!
NVDA 0.6p2 has just been released. The release is almost two weeks later than the original estimate proposed at the recent hack fest, as we decided to implement some additional noteworthy features, user interface changes, bug fixes and documentation updates.
Please note that this is a preview release, meaning that there are still some major issues to be fixed before the final 0.6 release. For more information about the current status of releases, see [ReleaseStatus ...
NVDA Featured in Yahoo UI Blog Post About Tab View Accessibility
NVDA features prominently in this post (and accompanying video) on the Yahoo UI blog: Enhancing TabView Accessibility with WAI-ARIA Roles and States
This highlights one of the great benefits and potential uses of NVDA. The fact that NVDA is free and open source software allows developers to test the accessibility of their web sites and/or applications with a fully functional screen reader without having to purchase an expensive product they ...
NVDA Hack Fest June 2008
Last week, Mick and I met in person in Melbourne, Australia for the second NVDA hack fest. It was a rather intense, brain-melting five days. Despite the name "hack fest", we actually didn't do a great deal of serious coding/hacking. Much of the time was spent in gruelling discussion and debate. We did some long overdue planning of NVDA milestones. In particular, we decided to make another preview release, 0.6p2, to be released by 25 July. We also covered difficu ...
Now Using 7-Zip Self-extracting Archives
We are now using 7-Zip self-extracting archives instead of zip archives; i.e. for portable NVDA snapshots and the NVDA Miscellaneous Dependencies package. 7-Zip archives provide better compression than zip archives and thus facilitate smaller file sizes. Also, self-extracting archives are more convenient for some users. If you want to perform operations other than extracting the entire archive, you can open these archives using ...
New NVDA Miscellaneous Dependencies Package (version 2008-06-26-01)
A new version of the NVDA Miscellaneous Dependencies package has been released. This version rearranges some files, which was necessary to fix #122.
This will be included in NVDA snapshots from r2161.
Users running from source must update to this new version if running r2160 or later.
New NVDA Miscellaneous Dependencies Package (version 2008-06-20-01)
A new version of the NVDA Miscellaneous Dependencies package has been released. This includes a new version of the virtual buffer library containing changes necessary for the implementation of the new quick navigation keys outlined in ticket #102. It also introduces a change to allow quick navigation and links list to detect some elements which were previously skipped.
This will be included in NVDA snapshots from r2149.
Users running from source must update to t ...
New NVDA Miscellaneous Dependencies Package (version 2008-06-17-01)
A new version of the NVDA Miscellaneous Dependencies package has been released. This includes a new version of the virtual buffer library. It also includes mfc71.dll, which is required to compile NVDA into an executable and is missing on many systems.
Noteworthy changes in the new version of the virtual buffer library include:
- Don't render unlabelled, non-interactive (i.e. not linked or clickable) graphics. This removes a lot of unnecessary clutter from many pa ...
New NVDA Web Site Launched
I am happy to announce that we have just launched the new NVDA web site on which we have been working for the past couple of weeks. This new site is based entirely on Trac and integrates all of our web services, including general information pages, downloads, wiki, issue tracker and blog. This allows for seemless referencing and interaction between services, greater community collaboration and ease of maintenance, among other benefits.
...
New NVDA Miscellaneous Dependencies Package (version 2008-05-29-01)
A new version of the NVDA Miscellaneous Dependencies package has been released. This includes a new version of the virtual buffer library.
Highlights include:
- Fix some potential lag in NVDA on very dynamic sites such as MSDN.
- Fix crashes on certain sites such as http://www.pennytel.com/.
- Fix crashes in documents that only contain an empty node.
- For images which aren't contained within a link, use the URL of the image itself. This means that images w ...
General Progress Update
It has been quite some time since the last general post. A great deal has happened over the past couple of months, including the CSUN conference and preparation therefor, about which I posted separately. I have thus been dreading writing this, as I struggle to remember some of the minor, but nonetheless important, happenings of the last couple of months.
Perhaps the most exciting work on NVDA has been that relating to the new in-proc ...
Project Contributors
The following people and organisations have contributed in some way to the NVDA project: Michael Curran, James Teh, Peter Vagner, Victor Tsaran, The Mozilla Foundation, Aleksey Sadovoy, Cleverson Casarin Uliana, Jani Kinnunen, Ali Savas, David Parduhn, Luca Maianti, Simone Dal Maso, Michel Such, Pierre Beauchamp, coscell Kao, Rui Batista, Serotek Corporation, J.J. Meddaugh, Juan C. buno, Tamás Géczy, Ângelo Miguel, Tomas Valusek, Jaromir Vit, David Picon, Enrique Varela, Halena rojas, Eric Yip, Dang Hoai Phuc, Jason Custer, Willem van der Walt, Bozenka Gogolakova, Dmitry Kaslin, DOROTA CZAJKA, Diogo Costa, Katsutoshi Tsuji, Amy Curran, Mathew Mirabella, and Jonathan Duddington.
NVDA is supported by 