Roberta: Today we have Dr Scott Hollier with us from Media Access Australia to talk about a free piece of assistive technology, the NVDA screen reader. Welcome, Scott.
Scott: Thanks, Roberta. Thanks for having me back.
Roberta: Now, firstly, what is NVDA?
The NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) is a free and open source screen reader for the Microsoft Windows operating system. It communicates the contents of a computer screen via synthetic speech and Braille, enabling people who are blind or vision impaired to perform computer tasks such as searching the internet and writing documents.
NVDA is the most advanced free screen reader for Windows, with the number of people using NVDA as their primary screen reader increasing by nearly 300% to 8.6% over a 14 month period, according to WebAIM’s screen reader survey. In addition, 60.4% of respondents indicated that free or low-cost screen readers such as NVDA are viable alternatives to commercial screen readers like JAWS.
The official NVDA blog of NVDA 2011.1 reports on the release and highlights some of the key new features which include but are not limited to:
