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The maintainer of the Orca screen reader, Joanie Diggs, has made noteworthy enhancements in recent weeks. I mention them here for the benefit of those who are not following these developments or who are not regular Linux screen reader users.
Many of the improvements are performance-related, taking advantage of the cache of accessibility tree nodes maintained by the AT-SPI service. Table processing has received particular attention, and fundamental changes are underway in the code that handles users' keystrokes, some of which need to be interpreted as screen reader commands, with the remainder being passed through to the application.
I have been testing some of the changes along the way, as have other users active on the Orca mailing list. Rapid and precise bug reports continue to contribute to the development process. At this point, it is reasonable to expect these valuable improvements to appear in a release during the first half of 2024, presumably as part of GNOME 46.
#linux #orca #ScreenReader #AssistiveTechnology #accessibility #Gnome


NVDA 2024.1 Beta 1 is now available for testing. Highlights include a new on-demand speech mode, the ability to drop speech modes from the NVDA+s command, a new "native selection" mode for Firefox, bulk actions in the add-on store & ability to review add-ons & more!

Note this release breaks add-on compatibility and only works on Windows 8.1 and newer.

Full info and Download from: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-1beta1/

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #Update #Beta #NewVersion #A11y #Accessibility #News


Content warning: bitWarden password manager, first impressions


Hey devs around here: how do you test accessibility?

I've been testing #mapcomplete with the #Orca #screenreader today, and fixing some issues but I feel quite unsure about it, so I'p interested in your approaches.

Or if someone who's using a screenreader could help me test (in #ghent or at #CCC), that would be appreciated


This festive season give the gift of accessibility with an NV Access donation. Your support ensures we continue delivering life-changing technology to blind and visually impaired people globally.
Donations can be made here, https://www.nvaccess.org/support-us/#donation-support

#Donate #Donation #NVDA #ScreenReader #Accessibility #Christmas


For the past couple of months I've been working on Pied (https://pied.mikeasoft.com), an application that makes it easy to use modern, natural sounding, text-to-speech voices on Linux. It does this by integrating the Piper neural text-to-speech engine with speech-dispatcher, so most existing software will work with it out of the box.

The first beta version is now available in the snap store: https://snapcraft.io/pied

And available as a Flatpak from https://pied.mikeasoft.com

(Other package formats will follow)

I'd appreciate any feedback if you're able to test it, thanks!

#TTS #accessibility #ScreenReader #linux #TextToSpeech


I am just testing @Jami with a #screenreader on both linux desktop and android for #accessibility.
Initial setup is accessible on both the platforms.
Listing conversations I can't really say as I only have single contact.
Audio calling is working fine. I am impressed that the call setup took just a moment. On android controls like microphone toggle, speaker / earpiece toggle and hangup button are working fine.
I am unable to find out in call controls with the keyboard on linux.
On both desktop and android I can write messages.
On android I can read messages, find and execute additional actions in the popup menu.
On the desktop I can't read incoming and outgoing messages with a screen reader. I haven't discovered on how to copy them.

In conclusion comparing this to the tox chat the Jami is more accessible with a screen reader. Perhaps I will be able to figure out how to handle the calls with a keyboard shortcuts however the fact message text is not readable with a screen reader on desktop linux and perhaps other platforms sounds dissapointing. The idea and decentralized nature of this communication app sounds really amazing.


In-Process is out! Featuring some more NVDA 2023.3 goodies, a few other things we've been up to, a sneak peek at something in NVDA 2024.1 AND a HUGE walkthrough of Object Navigation. If you're not familiar with how object navigation works after that, I'll give you a refund on the cost of your In-Process subscription! 🤑: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/in-process-4th-december-2023/

#NVAccess #NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #Blog #News #Tutorial #A11y #Accessibility


Congratulations to Gene, recipient of this year's RNZFB Chair's Award. It is wonderful to see your hard work & advocacy over many years acknowledged with this prestigious award. Gene has long advocated for NVDA & been a great friend to us in New Zealand. We're excited to see him honoured.

Read more at: https://blindlowvision.org.nz/news/chairs-award-2023/

#Blindness #Blind #Advocacy #RNZFB #BlindLowVision #A11y #Accessibility #NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader


"Access to a free, fast & efficient screen reader has changed my life. Because of its qualities, my computer never crashes; updates are frequent & the software works well. It follows best the evolution of Windows and all software. Updating is fast & easy, it is available in all languages. The provision of add-ons makes it really efficient” – Silvie, France

You can help continue to provide NVDA free to all! https://www.nvaccess.org/support-us/#donation-support
#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #Access #Accessibility #A11y


It’s been 5 months since Australian Story aired an episode on NV Access founders, Mick Curran & Jamie Teh. The first Australian Story episode to be audio described. It was an incredible opportunity to share with a wider audience the importance of NVDA & our overarching message, that everyone deserves equal access to technology.

You can still watch the Australian Story episode, with Audio Description, on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i7gkN-1sAI&t=1s
#ScreenReader #NVDA #NVDAsr #Accessibility #A11y #Access


In-Process is out! Featuring all the news about the new NVDA 2023.3, automatic Braille display detection, corporate giving, Seeing Differently's Tech Fest and more! Read now at: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/in-process-6th-november-2023/ #NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #Blog #News #Blind


If you are in Adelaide (South Australia) today, come and see James and Quentin at See Differently's Tech Fest.

https://www.seedifferently.org.au/get-involved/events/

#NVDA #NVDAsr #SeeDifferently #ScreenReader #events


NV Access is pleased to announce that version 2023.3 of NVDA, the free screen reader for Microsoft Windows, is now available for download. We encourage all users to upgrade to this version, which is the last version compatible with Windows 7.

This release includes audio updates and refreshable OCR. There are fixes for Braille, the add-on store, Office, Edge, Calculator and more!

Read the full details and download from: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2023-3/

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #News #Accessibility


Is it just me, or is the interface for searching in #thunderbird really clunky with #NVDAsr? Seems like it takes a lot of steps just to view the list of results. I find myself resorting to iOS mail if I need to track down a message from a few days ago. Is it better with a different #Screenreader? #accessibility #a11y #Jaws #JFW


NVDA 2023.3 RC 2 has been released. Changes from RC1 are translation updates for some languages. We encourage all users to download and test this RC and provide feedback. Please read the full what's new and download the release candidate from: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2023-3rc2/ #NVDASr #NVDA #ScreenReader #Update #NewVersion


The NVDA 2023.3 Release Candidate is now available for testing. We encourage ALL users to download this RC and give feedback. Unless any critical bugs are found, this will be identical to the final 2023.3 release.

This release includes refreshable OCR, responsiveness improvements, braille fixes and many other bug fixes and improvements.

Read the full details and download from: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2023-3rc1/
#NVDA #NVDASr #ScreenReader


In-Process for the 19th October is out! Featuring updates on 2023.3, including the new audio settings and refreshable OCR, an update from the NASA Space Apps Challenge, and an important head's up for Windows 7 users. All that and more at https://www.nvaccess.org/post/in-process-19th-october-2023/ #NVDA #ScreenReader #Blog #News #Accessibility


Hey all music lovers especially those of us who are using #screenreader apps to control music playback. #Foobar2000 for #android now features so called Non skinned playback controls view that can be activated by unchecking the Skinned playback screen checkbox in its advanced settings. This improvement is available in the beta version so far. See the mobile changelog at https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Mobile_Version_1.4_Preview_Change_Log


@🆃🅸🅼🆃🆃🅼🆈 @Snikket @thomholwerda #XMPP is excelent choice although unfortunatelly #Dino is not keyboard and #screenreader accessible on linux and windows thus it may not suit some people. For majority I think it's awesome. #Conversations is fully accessible and hopefully it'll stay like this in the future.


Yesterday I started a new miniseries on my channel, in which I try to make a tutorial about a single topic in under 10 minutes. Starting with:
Logic Pro Bite Size for VI's - Loading Third Party Plugins https://youtu.be/nIRyG-puBfs
#LogicPro #Blind #VI #VisuallyImpaired #ScreenReader #VoiceOver


I’ve started a new miniseries on my channel today, in which I try to make a tutorial about a single topic in under 10 minutes. Starting with:
Logic Pro Bite Size for VI's - Loading Third Party Plugins https://youtu.be/nIRyG-puBfs
#LogicPro #Blind #VI #VisuallyImpaired #ScreenReader #VoiceOver


The default text to speech options on most (all?) linux distros are pretty outdated, so I'm working on a little tool to easily install and configure a more modern option (Piper) and fully integrate it with existing applications via speech-dispatcher

As a result of my fiddling around, I now have @popey narrating my every action through the Orca screen reader...

#TTS #linux #ScreenReader


We’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for your continued support & input. It’s with your help that NVDA impacts lives across the globe. There are many more blind or visually impaired people who need our help globally. We rely on donations to help keep delivering our users uncompromising, quality, and updated software. You can help us continue our mission by donating at https://www.nvaccess.org/support-us/#donation-support

Thank you everyone!
#AustralianStory #NVDA #NVAccess #ScreenReader #A11y #Accessibility


Australian Story was amazing! We loved filming it and we are so grateful to share the story behind NVDA. If you missed the episode it is available on ABC iView here: https://iview.abc.net.au/video/NC2302Q015S00 or on YouTube:

Audio Description enabled version: https://youtu.be/3i7gkN-1sAI
Non audio described version: https://youtu.be/jwHbXh3WzSw

Thank you everyone!
#AustralianStory #NVDA #NVAccess #AccessibleTechnology #ScreenReader #A11y #Accessibility


What a beautiful story of #OpenSource #FOSS #FLOSS #software from #ABC news from Kristine Taylor and Susan Chenery - @kristineataylor@twitter.com and @chenery3@twitter.com - Jamie Teh - @jcsteh and Mick Curran - @md_curran@twitter.com, who both live with #blindness, created #NVDA software which is a desktop #ScreenReader - and continue to give it away for free.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-05/mick-curran-jamie-teh-changing-lives-of-the-blind-with-nvda/101768788

Get the software here on @github https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda

#a11y


Our In-Process blog is out. The big news is that our founders Mick and Jamie are featured on this Monday's episode of Australian Story! Plus we're hiring a software engineer, we share more of your inspiring user stories, and we've got some tips on testing with NVDA and using the Speech Viewer.

https://www.nvaccess.org/post/in-process-2nd-june-2023/

#NVDA #ScreenReader #Accessibility #A11y #AustralianStory #blog


Over the past year, I've been experimenting with neural text to speech in various forms. I have done hours of experimentation and research, training models and getting varying results along the way. Some of you may have heard of Piper, an open source synthesizer and add on for NVDA that can be trained by anyone. It is currently in active development, and I have been there from the beginning, testing and evaluating the various versions. For years, I have had a goal to create a high-quality voice that is truly usable by a screen reader user, and yesterday I managed to achieve this. I'm really excited to share Alba, a female Scottish English voice. I'm considering this a beta phase, and I'm looking for feedback to make improvements as needed. Please note that you will most likely get an error upon installation, however the voice should still show up to NVDA, and I'm working on fixing this as soon as possible.
Link to Piper: https://github.com/rhasspy/piper/tree/v0.1.0
Link to addon: https://github.com/mush42/piper-nvda?ref=building.open-home.io
Link to Alba: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wZHuIll6aEEFd4OdLBCVcxF7bd3PbQTB/view?usp=share_link #TTS #AI #ScreenReader #Piper


This week we bring you Nimer from the USA. Nimer started using NVDA around 2007 and has been involved in our community ever since. He is currently the owner of the NVDA community mailing group.
Nimer first began using NVDA for schoolwork over 15 years ago, and now utilises it in his workplace at Google.
“NVDA’s a really powerful tool for me that I rely on all the time” – Nimer
Thank you Nimer for sharing with us how NVDA continues to play a significant role in your life!
#NVDA #ScreenReader


This has been going around on Twitter, but I neglected my community here :) I'm sorry about this :)
Tomorrow at noon EST, I will give a #talk on the #accessibility of #language #learning and #linguistics in general for #screenReader users as part of the a11yTalks event. This will be a public event with no need to register so if this is something any of you are interested in, here's the link :) https://a11ytalks.com/posts/2023-MAY/ #speaker #a11y


Today I am disappointed and disgusted to say that #WesternDigital have sent me an email that has very important content in it, but it's inaccessible.
They've suffered a data breach, but the information about said breach has been put into the email as an image.
A #ScreenReader user without some level of tech knowledge would be unable to read that, and may actually think it's spam. To us, it goes straight to the line that says 'Copyright 2023 Western Digital' and skips all the salient points.
Utterly disgusting behaviour from such a large company about such an important topic.
If you're of a mind to do so, please boost to raise awareness.
This email is seemingly *not* a drill.


Not really. It's #VoiceOver for #iOS, and different synths treat it differently, but it is not a reliable or nice experience. You may have an easy ride, but that doesn't mean everyone else will, and my post proves this. There's simply no need for this kind of frilly behaviour. Standard lettering is not only understandable by a #ScreenReader, but by a non-English speaker too, who may not recognise those letters for their so-called intended purpose.


The "Report link destination" command in NVDA 2023.1 is very popular. Press NVDA+k to report exactly where a link goes. This is an important #security feature for users. Do you use it? Read more in our In-Process blog: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/in-process-6th-april-2023/ #a11y #ScreenReader #NVDA


@hub

This is a great meme!

Edit: seems that due to my configuration error I couldn’t see the Alt Text. I’m troubleshooting.

Original:

This happens during interview.
Interviewer(I): We offer a competitive salary.
Candidate(C): How much?
I: Don't worry, it's competitive. What skills do you have?
C: I have amazing skills.
I: Great. Can you tell me more?
C: Don't worry, they're amazing.

#accessibility web #meme . Make it more friendly to #screenReader users


This week's In-Process is out! Featuring NVDA 2023.1, a feature on the new link destination reporting feature, an update on Windows 7 and 8 support, thanks to our wonderful community & handy ways to recover unsaved Word documents from Microsoft. Now at: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/in-process-6th-april-2023/ #NVDA #NVAccess #NVDAsr #ScreenReader