Blind Main

Good morning everyone,

NV Access is pleased to announce that version 2024.3 of NVDA, the free screen reader for Microsoft Windows, is now available for download. We encourage all users to upgrade to this version. Highlights below; the full information and download links available from: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-3/

Highlights The Add-on Store will now notify you if any add-on updates are available on NVDA startup.

There are now options to apply Unicode normalization to speech and braille output. This can be useful when reading characters that are unknown to a particular speech synthesizer or braille table and which have a compatible alternative, like the bold and italic characters commonly used on social media. It also allows reading of equations in the Microsoft Word equation editor.

Help Tech Activator Pro braille displays are now supported.

Unassigned commands have been added to scroll the mouse wheel vertically and horizontally.

There are several bug fixes, particularly for the Windows 11 Emoji Panel and Clipboard history. For web browsers, there are fixes for reporting error messages, figures, captions, table labels and checkbox/radio button menu items.

LibLouis has been updated, adding new Braille tables for Cyrillic Serbian, Yiddish, several ancient languages, Turkish, and the International Phonetic Alphabet. eSpeak has been updated, adding support for the Karakalpak language. Unicode CLDR has also been updated.

The Release Candidate (RC) of NVDA 2024.3 is now available for download and testing.

We encourage all users to download this RC and provide feedback.

Unless any critical bugs are found, this will be identical to the final 2024.3 release.

Read more & Download: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-3rc1/

Highlights of NVDA 2024.3:

The Add-on Store will now notify you if any add-on updates are available on NVDA startup.

There are now options to apply Unicode normalization to speech and braille output. This can be useful when reading characters that are unknown to a particular speech synthesizer or braille table and which have a compatible alternative, like the bold and italic characters commonly used on social media. It also allows reading of equations in the Microsoft Word equation editor.

Help Tech Activator Pro braille displays are now supported.

Unassigned commands have been added to scroll the mouse wheel vertically and horizontally.

There are several bug fixes, particularly for the Windows 11 Emoji Panel and Clipboard history. For web browsers, there are fixes for reporting error messages, figures, captions, table labels and checkbox/radio button menu items.

LibLouis has been updated, adding new Braille tables for Cyrillic Serbian, Yiddish, several ancient languages, Turkish, and the International Phonetic Alphabet. eSpeak has been updated, adding support for the Karakalpak language. Unicode CLDR has also been updated.

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #Beta #PreRelease #FOSS #A11y

Shout out today to one of our illustrious moderators @rumster - who recently acquired NVDA Expert Certification!

I must admit I am not sure of all the other mods so apologies if I've missed anyone else out there :)

NVDA Expert Certification is an online exam you can sit, which tests your knowledge of the NVDA screen reader. The exam is free for anyone to sit, with a cost if you wish to purchase the certification - purchasing gets you a certificate you can print, a badge you can put on your email or other online presence, and a warm, fuzzy feeling from helping us continue to provide NVDA for free to anyone, anywhere in the world!

If interested, find out more at: https://certification.nvaccess.org - and in any case, know that we have a wonderful, knowledgeable and supportive community here, so thank you!

Hi everyone,

NVDA 2024.3 Beta 6 is now available! Since Beta 5 the main change is that we fixed a bug with Unicode character normalization - and we updated some more translations. Do please download and test it and keep letting us know of any issues! Read the full details on NVDA 2024.3 and the new beta here: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-3beta6/

Count the dots to guess the word in Brailliance, a unique puzzle game which combines braille, spelling, and simple arithmetic into an experience you can't find anywhere else. No knowledge of braille is required to play, though you will certainly learn some as you go.

Brailliance is beautiful and addicting, consisting of a fun daily puzzle and over 1,500 levels with increasing challenge. Additionally, the game can be played if you're blind! Brailliance supports all screen readers and refreshable braille displays. But whether you're blind or sighted, figuring out the braille alphabet is exciting along the way.

Brailliance is available right now for free on the Apple App Store, Google Play, and on the web at ThemisGames.com.

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/brailliance-learn-braille/id6478794947

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exceptionullgames.brailliance

Web: https://www.themisgames.com/brailliance/menu

Communities like this (rblind.com) and r/blind are focused on serving the blind and visually impaired community, including friends and family. They’re also valuable as an opportunity for people outside the community to learn about the blind experience.

That brings us to the question: sighted friends, what have you learned that you’d like to share?

Beta3 of NVDA 2024.3 is now available for download & testing. Changes from Beta2 include Add-on update notifications no longer appear when running the NVDA installer & updates to translations. Read more & download from: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-3beta3/

Highlights of 2024.3 include notification of add-on updates, Unicode normalisation options, Help Tech Activator Pro display support, mouse wheel scrolling commands, bug fixes for emoji panel & browsers

#Beta #NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #PreRelease #FOSS

NV Access is pleased to invite you to participate in the NVDA Satisfaction Survey 2024.

At NV Access we are always interested in understanding the satisfaction of our NVDA users.

Plus, we like to understand clearly what is important to you and also identify what we can do more effectively.

As in previous years, it is a simple, 3-question survey. It is open to NVDA users and testers around the world. We encourage everyone to complete the NVDA Satisfaction Survey 2024. You can find the survey at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeKimQWY1UGBfZkg2a8cpgo790DjyUefRy0GCKNdqXYUwMmYQ/viewform

As with last year, the survey is on Google Forms however you do not need to have a Google account to submit the form.

Completing the survey questions will assist us with improving the NVDA user experience. Please do participate, and share with others, thank you!

NV Access are very pleased to announce the release of NVDA 2024.2! Please download from: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-2/

Highlights include Sound Split, numerous new keystrokes, new Braille mode & other features, updates to eSpeak, LibLouis & other dependencies & programs.

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #A11y #Accessibility #New #Release #FOSS #Update #NewVersion

There doesn’t seem to be much going on in this forum. I wonder if one reason is that the UI UX is a bit clunky. At least I’m finding it challenging to use NVDA with it. I’m used to having a learning curve for NVDA use on practrically all new websites I visit. But this forum seems more challenging than even Reddit (and that’s saysing a lot) and groups.io. The main screen is easy enough. H gets me going through the thread titles just fine. But when I open a thread I H to get to the top of the thread content, but then I have to do about 9 downarrows to get to the the content. Then getting to the next post is okay, but once again tetting to the content of the post requires lots of k and downarrowss in just the right sequence. Seems like a real pain. And then there is the fact that credentials go stale immediately upon leaving. I always have to log back in. Again, more priction. Am I just missing something here?

Hello,

I'm trying to help my Dad talk to his brother (my Uncle).

Can you recommend a voice calling app that:

• works on Android and iPhone
• supports Siri "Call [contact] using [voice calling app name]"
• supports VoiceOver two finger double tap Magic tap to answer or end a call
• does not require an actual phone number
• bonus points if it supports video

Long winded background follows...

Uncle lives in UK and can see just fine, but does not like Apple or Facebook so he's got an Android phone. Dad is in Canada and has an iPhone. He's pretty good with Siri and making good progress with VoiceOver. He does not have a phone plan so no phone number.

If my Mum is around my Uncle sets up Zoom calls and they can talk. If my Mum is not around Dad can call Uncle's regular phone number using a VOIP client "Hey Siri, call Uncle using GroundWire." However for some bizarre reason the UK reverted to 1990's phone rates after Brexit so these Canada-UK calls cost $0.4361/min vs the Can-US VOIP rates of 0.01/min. $25/hr feels egregious, although it does work very well.

I thought Signal was the answer, but Dad won't be able to register since he doesn't have a phone number and even then Signal doesn't support Siri.

I looked at Discord but it seemed pretty cluttered and complicated.

This looks like the replacement for BGT. For those of you who haven't heard of BGT, it was a game engine for creating audiogames that was developed throughout the early 2010's. It's possible to migrate old BGT games to NVGT with just a little bit of work. Here's hoping that NVGT brings on a new golden age of cross-platform audiogames.

Life is hard - for everybody, but in many ways more so for blind and visually impaired folks. It’s also awesome though, so let’s talk about that.

What did you recently succeed in and want to talk about? Work, relationships, travel… something else?

Hi everyone,

As part of a school course, I am currently conducting a survey for our product "Color Sense." This project is specially designed to help blind or visually impaired individuals choose their clothes independently using tags that integrate braille and a QR code. Your participation in this survey would be extremely valuable in helping us improve our product and better meet your needs.

Link to the survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd-ShxAK5tcA4lYLcq9AyD5EHNvY1zNvGvM-VELhZoG0n3K7A/viewform?usp=sf_link

If you have difficulty answering the survey yourself, please feel free to ask someone to help you complete it.

Thank you in advance for your participation and valuable assistance!

This week's In-Process is out, featuring all you need to know about copying text in Word, using Browse mode in Word, getting help in NVDA, and a special thanks to our friends at ISCB! All online now: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/in-process-6th-may-2024/

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #Accessibility #Microsoft #MicrosoftOffice #Office365 #Office #Keyboard

hi all I want to trade my hearthstone account, with a lot of grinded time and resources for a suggestion of an other tcg game the best suggestion wins, it's on forum audiogames.net too. https://forum.audiogames.net/topic/53175/trading-out-my-hearthstone-account-for-any-other-interesting-tcg/ I'll aggregate all replies from everywhere, don't worry. blizzard do'es really bad decisions, and I am fed up with that, but if someone wants the account they can participate, if you aren't interested, you can stil give suggestion, by just saying that you don't participate.

Join the Brailliance native app beta!

iOS TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/PSwzeHVM

Android Beta: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.exceptionullgames.brailliance

We are testing app versions of Brailliance, our new game where you count braille dots to guess the word. This version incorporates a ton of your feedback from the web version of the game, all while benefiting from the advantages of being a native app.

To download the beta on iOS TestFlight, download Apple's TestFlight app on the App Store. Once you do, you can follow the link above and TestFlight will allow you to register for early access. Once you do, you can find a download button for Brailliance directly within the TestFlight app.

To download the beta on Android, so long as you have Google Play, follow the link above and tap "Become a Tester." After a moment, you'll see a link to access Brailliance on the Google Play store.

We're particularly interested in the impressions of VoiceOver and TalkBack users on phones and tablets. Brailliance supports a lot of ways to play, from standard web-style navigation to Perkins input via braille displays and the on-screen braille keyboard. The game also supports keyboards on most devices.

HOW TO PLAY:

Type a word to make a guess. The correct word will contain the number of braille dots shown.

As you make guesses, you will be told which letters are in the word and which letters are not. These "green" letters can be anywhere in the word.

Try to guess the word in as few guesses as possible. However, you get unlimited guesses. Also, you can guess any word up to the correct number of dots, but not over it.

Use your math skills to figure out which letters are likely to be in the answer. For instance, if you know all of the correct letters except one, and that you need three more dots to complete the word, that last letter must be a three-dot braille letter.

NV Access is pleased to announce that version 2024.1 of NVDA, the free screen reader for Microsoft Windows, is now available for download. We encourage all users to upgrade to this version.

Highlights

• “on-demand” speech mode
• Native selection mode in Firefox
• Bulk actions in the Add-on Store Many more updates and fixes. Please see the release announcement for all the info and download links: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-1-released/

Hello everyone, this is Velix.

I am a geographer from Germany. I am a sighted person, but I create accessible documents (PDFs) at our research institute. An exchange with visually impaired people is therefore very important to me.

What I have noticed is that although there is a lot of specialist literature on the subject, there are only a few good example documents that do not contradict the current standards (e.g. PDF/UA-1).

For example, I currently have the problem of how footnotes should be correctly tagged in documents. I don't want screenreader users to get into trouble with those notes.

Can someone link me to a few good documents that have footnotes and are easy to read with the screenreaders?

I'll then borrow the implementation to make our scientific reports even more accessible.

Thanks in advance, Velix

I'll be checking out the exhibit hall on Friday, and then heading to Disneyland.

How about you guys? For anyone attending, what're you looking forward to seeing this year? I believe Orbit Research is going to be demoing the Optima laptop, which I'm pretty excited to get a look at.

cross-posted from: https://rblind.com/post/2652410

I was making a braille learning app when I came up with this game idea. You count the braille dots to guess the word. https://www.themisgames.com/brailliance/menu

Do you think it's too hard? I want to experiment with ways to make it easier. I'm also actively working to add more iOS-specific VoiceOver support with a native app. Perhaps make the perkins input easier.

Hi everyone, I read somewhere that you could connect the rblind lemmy instance to mastodon, does this mean that I can use Mona to create and browse posts in rblind lemmy? If so, how do I do this please? Thanks for your help everyone :-)

In a brief departure from sanity, I recently thought to myself, "surely ZoomText must be better than it once was, I'll try it again!"

I downloaded on my laptop, looks relatively good. I download it on my desktop, I download it on my desktop, everything just looks blurry/squiggly.

So I called tech support, to see if they can help me sort this out before I buy the app.

Highlights from the call have included, but are not limited to:

"The clarity of the text depends on the website, what font they use. As it gets bigger it's going to get blurry."

When I explain that zoomtext hooks into, like, the actual text in the apps it can (which I don't actually know the technical term for, lol) tech support guy informs me that he doesn't think that's how the app works. (That it's all just, like, interpolation like zooming into a digital photo.) EDIT: I subsequently found out that they have been having issues with the "xFont" feature for years now.

Dude wants to make a registry edit. Bold move, tier 1 tech support bro, but it just looks like a font change, probably not going to brick anything.

Taskbar no longer functions correctly after reboot, even with Zoomtext off. He scrolls aimlessly in the registry before going into Zoomtext and trying to make changes that have absolutely no relation.

I pointed this out. He told me he knows. He proceeds to try to make changes in zoomtext repeatedly anyways.

He then informs me that he's waiting for his colleague for help.

When I ask if this can be escalated above tier 1, as I rather would like them to unbrick it, he tells me "he's the one who gave us the change." Okay, that does not inspire confidence...

At one point, he told me to "calm down."

When I asked him to just email me over the changes he made, he tells me "you're looking at it." I was not, in fact, looking at it.

We are now on hold for his "colleague," or at least for him to furiously google registry changes how to revert or something.

In addition to the above bricking, the text in zoomtext is just as blurry as it was. 😂

Update: after he failed to solve the problem, he tells me that although it's "hard to believe," the registry edit had nothing to do with an immediate problem upon reboot, and they're totally unrelated and there's nothing he can do. But don't worry, he's going to forward my contact info to management!

Update 2: I fixed the problem a couple of minutes off the call by, shockingly, reverting the change he made to the registry.

Update 3: to their credit, a manager and supervisor called me just now. They expressed concern over the support I received during the call, and were ready to help me fix the registry issue, which was thankfully already resolved. I outlined the troubleshooting steps I've taken, they agreed that I tried all the easy fixes, and said that the person to talk to was someone with much more Ai Squared/Zoomtext knowledge to their Freedom Scientific/JAWS knowledge, who was out on vacation and could call me next week. Overall the people I spoke with seemed fairly competent and helpful. They sent me over a 90 day trial code (versus running in 40 minute mode) to troubleshoot the problem. While they didn't have an immediate solution to my issues with Zoomtext, I appreciated both their willingness to follow up on the issue as well as their acknowledgement that a mistake had been made by the previous person I spoke with.

10/10 experience all around.