NVDA

What's new in this version:

New Features:
- It is now possible to hear the description for any given character by pressing the review current character script twice in quick succession. For English characters this is the standard English phonetic alphabet. For pictagraphic languages such as traditional Chinese, one or more example phraises using the given symbol are provided. Also pressing review current word or review current line three times will spell the word/line using the first of these descriptions. (#55)
- More text can be seen in flat review for applications such as Mozilla Thunderbird that write their text directly to the display as glyphs.
- It is now possible to choose from several levels of punctuation and symbol announcement. (#332)
- When punctuation or other symbols are repeated more than four times, the number of repetitions is now announced instead of speaking the repeated symbols. (#43)
- New braille translation tables: Norwegian 8 dot computer braille, Ethiopic grade 1, Slovene grade 1, Serbian grade 1. (#1456)
- Speech no longer unnaturally pauses at the end of each line when using the say all command. (#149)
- NVDA will now announce whether something is sorted (according to the aria-sort property) in web browsers. (#1500)
- Unicode Braille Patterns are now displayed correctly on braille displays. (#1505)
- In Internet Explorer and other MSHTML controls when focus moves inside a group of controls (surrounded by a fieldset), NVDA will now announce the name of the group (the legend). (#535)
- In Internet Explorer and other MSHTML controls, the aria-labelledBy and aria-describedBy properties are now honoured.
- in Internet Explorer and other MSHTML controls, support for ARIA list, gridcell, slider and progressbar controls has been improved.
- Users can now change the pronunciation of punctuation and other symbols, as well as the symbol level at which they are spoken. (#271, #1516)
- In Microsoft Excel, the name of the active sheet is now reported when switching sheets with control+pageUp or control+pageDown. (#760)
- When navigating a table in Microsoft Word with the tab key NVDA will now announce the current cell as you move. (#159)
- You can now configure whether table cell coordinates are reported from the Document Formatting preferences dialog. (#719)
- NVDA can now detect formatting and color for text written to the screen.
- In the Outlook Express/Windows Mail/Windows Live Mail message list, NVDA will now announce the fact that a message is unread and also if it's expanded or collapsed in the case of conversation threads. (#868)
- eSpeak now has a rate boost setting which triples the speaking rate.
- Support for the calendar control found in the Date and Time Information dialog accessed from the Windows 7 clock. (#1637)
- Additional key bindings have been added for the MDV Lilli braille display. (#241)
- New languages: Bulgarian, Albanian.

Changes:
- To move the caret to the review cursor, now press the move focus to navigator object script (desktop NVDA+shift+numpadMinus, laptop NVDA+shift+backspace) twice in quick succession. This frees up more keys on the keyboard. (#837)
- To hear the decimal and hexadecimal representation of the character under the review cursor, now press review current character three times rather than twice, as twice now speaks the character description.
- Updated eSpeak speech synthesiser to 1.45.03. (#1465)
- Layout tables are no longer announced in Mozilla Gecko applications while moving the focus when in focus mode or outside of a document.
- In Internet Explorer and other MSHTML controls, browse mode now works for documents inside ARIA applications. (#1452)
- Updated liblouis braille translator to 2.3.0.
- When in browse mode and jumping to a control with quicknav or focus, the description of the control is now announced if it has one.
- Progress bars are now announced in brows mode.
- Nodes marked with an ARIA role of presentation in Internet Explorer and other MSHTML controls are now filtered out of simple review and the focus ancestry.
- NVDA's user interface and documentation now refer to virtual buffers as browse mode, as the term "virtual buffer" is rather meaningless to most users. (#1509)
- When the user wishes to copy their user settings to the system profile for use on the logon screen, etc., and their settings contain custom plugins, they are now warned that this could be a security risk. (#1426)
- The NVDA service no longer starts and stops NVDA on user input desktops.
- On Windows XP and Windows Vista, NVDA no longer makes use of UI Automation even if it is available via the platform update. Although using UI Automation can improve the accessibility of some modern applications, on XP and Vista there were too many freezes, crashes and over all performance loss while using it. (#1437)
- In applications using Mozilla Gecko 2 and later (such as Firefox 4 and later), a document can now be read in browse mode before it is fully finished loading.
- NVDA now announces the state of a container when focus moves to a control inside it (e.g. if focus moves inside a document that is still loading it will report it as busy).
- NVDA's user interface and documentation no longer use the terms "first child" and "parent" with respect to object navigation, as these terms are confusing for many users.
- Collapsed is no longer reported for some menu items which have sub-menus.
- The reportCurrentFormatting script (NVDA+f) now reports the formatting at the position of the review cursor rather than the system caret / focus. As by default the review cursor follows the caret, most people should not notice a difference. However this now enables the user to find out the formatting when moving the review cursor, such as in flat review.

Bug Fixes:
- Collapsing combo boxes in browse mode documents when focus mode has been forced with NVDA+space no longer auto-switches back to browse mode. (#1386)
- In Gecko (e.g. Firefox) and MSHTML (e.g. Internet Explorer) documents, NVDA now correctly renders certain text on the same line which was previously rendered on separate lines. (#1378)
- When Braille is tethered to review and the navigator object is moved to a browse mode document, either manually or due to a focus change, braille will appropriately show the browse mode content. (#1406, #1407)
- When speaking of punctuation is disabled, certain punctuation is no longer incorrectly spoken when using some synthesisers. (#332)
- Problems no longer occur when loading configuration for synthesisers which do not support the voice setting such as Audiologic Tts3. (#1347)
- The Skype Extras menu is now read correctly. (#648)
- Checking the Brightness controls volume checkbox in the Mouse Settings dialog should no longer cause a major lag for beeps when moving the mouse around the screen on Windows Vista/Windows 7 with Aero enabled. (#1183)
- When NVDA is configured to use the laptop keyboard layout, NVDA+delete now works as documented to report the dimensions of the current navigator object. (#1498)
- NVDA now Appropriately honours the aria-selected attribute in Internet Explorer documents.
- When NVDA automatically switches to focus mode in browse mode documents, it now announces information about the context of the focus. For example, if a list box item receives focus, the list box will be announced first. (#1491)
- In Internet Explorer and other MSHTML controls, ARIA listbox controls are now treeted as lists, rather than list items.
- When a read-only editable text control receives focus, NVDA now reports that it is read-only. (#1436)
- In browse mode, NVDA now behaves correctly with respect to read-only editable text fields.
- In browse mode documents, NVDA no longer incorrectly switches out of focus mode when aria-activedescendant is set; e.g. when the completion list appeared in some auto complete controls.
- In Adobe Reader, the name of controls is now reported when moving focus or using quick navigation in browse mode.
- In XFA PDF documents in Adobe Reader, buttons, links and graphics are now rendered correctly.
- In XFA PDF documents in Adobe Reader, all elements are now rendered on separate lines. This change was made because large sections (sometimes even the entire document) were being rendered without breaks due to the general lack of structure in these documents.
- Fixed problems when moving focus to or away from editable text fields in XFA PDF documents in Adobe Reader.
- In XFA PDF documents in Adobe Reader, changes to the value of a focused combo box will now be reported.
- Owner-drawn Combo boxes such as the ones to choose colors in Outlook Express are now accessible with NVDA. (#1340)
- In languages which use a space as a digit group/thousands separator such as French and German, numbers from separate chunks of text are no longer pronounced as a single number. This was particularly problematic for table cells containing numbers. (#555)
- nodes with an ARIA role of description in Internet Explorer and other MSHTML controls now are classed as static text, not edit fields.
- Fixed various issues when pressing tab while focus is on a document in browse mode (e.g. tab inappropriately moving to the address bar in Internet Explorer). (#720, #1367)
- When entering lists while reading text, NVDA now says, for example, "list with 5 items" instead of "listwith 5 items". (#1515)
- In input help mode, gestures are logged even if their scripts bypass input help such as the scroll braille display forward and back commands.
- In input help mode, when a modifier is held down on the keyboard, NVDA no longer reports the modifier as if it is modifying itself; e.g. NVDA+NVDA.
- In Adobe Reader documents, pressing c or shift+c to navigate to a combo box now works.
- The selected state of selectable table rows is now reported the same way it is for list and tree view items.
- Controls in Firefox and other Gecko applications can now be activated while in browse mode even if their content has been floated off-screen. (#801)
- You can no longer show an NVDA settings dialog while a message dialog is being shown, as the settings dialog was frozen in this case. (#1451)
- In Microsoft Excel, there is no longer a lag when holding down or rapidly pressing keys to move between or select cells.
- Fixed intermittent crashes of the NVDA service which meant that NVDA stopped running on secure Windows screens.
- Fixed problems that sometimes occurred with braille displays when a change caused text that was being displayed to disappear. (#1377)
- The downloads window in Internet Explorer 9 can now be navigated and read with NVDA. (#1280)
- It is no longer possible to accidentally start multiple copies of NVDA at the same time. (#507)
- On slow systems, NVDA no longer inappropriately causes its main window to be shown all the time while running. (#726)
- NVDA no longer crashes on Windows xP when starting a WPF application. (#1437)
- Say all and say all with review are now able to work in UI automation text controls that support all required functionality. For example, you can now use say all with review on XPS Viewer documents.
- NVDA no longer inappropriately classes some list items in the Outlook Express / Windows Live Mail message rules Apply Now dialog as being checkboxes. (#576)
- Combo boxes are no longer reported as having a sub-menu.
- NVDA is now able to read the recipiants in the To, CC and BCC fields in Microsoft Outlook. (#421)
- Fixed the issue in NVDA's Voice Settings dialog where the value of sliders was sometimes not reported when changed. (#1411)
- NVDA no longer fails to announce the new cell when moving in an Excel spreadsheet after cutting and pasting. (#1567)
- NVDA no longer becomes worse at guessing color names the more colors it announces.
- In Internet Explorer and other MSHTML controls, fixed the inability to read parts of rare pages which contain iframes marked with an ARIA role of presentation. (#1569)
- In Internet Explorer and other MSHTML controls, fixed a rare problem where the focus kept bouncing infinitely between the document and a multi-line editable text field in focus mode. (#1566)
- In Microsoft Word 2010 NVDA will now automatically read confirmation dialogs. (#1538)
- In multi-line editable text fields in Internet Explorer and other MSHTML controls, selection on lines after the first is now reported correctly. (#1590)
- Improved moving by word in many cases, including browse mode and Windows Edit controls. (#1580)
- The NVDA installer no longer shows garbled text for Hong Kong versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7. (#1596)
- NVDA no longer fails to load the Microsoft Speech API version 5 synthesizer if the configuration contains settings for that synthesizer but is missing the voice setting. (#1599)
- In editable text fields in Internet Explorer and other MSHTML controls, NVDA no longer lags or freezes when braille is enabled.
- In firefox brows mode, NVDA no longer refuses to include content that is inside a focusable node with an ARIA role of presentation.
- In Microsoft Word with braille enabled, lines on pages after the first page are now reported correctly. (#1603)
- In Microsoft Word 2003, lines of right-to-left text can once again be read with braille enabled. (#627)
- In Microsoft Word, say all now works correctly when the document does not end with a sentence ending.
- When opening a plain text message in Windows Live Mail 2011, NVDA will correctly focus on the message document allowing it to be read.
- NVDA no longer temporarily freezes or refuses to speak when in the Move to / Copy to dialogs in Windows Live Mail. (#574)
- In Outlook 2010, NVDA will now correctly track the focus in the message list. (#1285)
- Some USB connection issues have been resolved with the MDV Lilli braille display. (#241)
- In Internet explorer and other MSHTML controls, spaces are no longer ignored in browse mode in certain cases (e.g. after a link).
- In Internet Explorer and other MSHTML controls, some extraneous line breaks have been eliminated in browse mode. specifically, HTML elements with a display style of None no longer force a line break. (#1685)
- If NVDA is unable to start, failure to play the Windows critical stop sound no longer clobbers the critical error message in the log file.