Dipendra, This is fantastic! Eagerly keeping an eye out for your progress bulletins.
George -----Original Message----- From: AccessIndia [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dipendra Manocha Sent: 05 September 2013 23:25 To: accessindia Subject: [AI] NEW EXCITING DEVELOPMENT IN SCREEN READING SOFTWARE Dear Access-Indians I would like to share a very exciting development in the area of Screen Reading software. As you all know that NVDA is an open source screen reading software that can be downloaded free of cost from nvaccess.org web site. Its latest version is 2013-2 released just few days ago. There are some good developments related to NVDA here in India. First; A development team is now working right here in India contributing new features and improving the screen reading software. The team is lead by one of our brightest software developer who himself is a screen reading software user. He is Mr. Manish Agrawal. Manish works full time with Sapient Technologies at very senior knowledge resource and he now gives 40% of his time specifically to the NVDA project. He is supported by one more dedicated developer and also very experienced screen reading software tester. IIT Delhi is also putting a team together to work under Manish to contribute in development of NVDA. All these efforts are under a joint project being implemented by CIS and Saksham and supported by enable-India. Thanks to Hans Foundation to provide financial support to run this project. Specific objective of getting a team here in India is to work on priorities set by users in India. The team started its work by concentrating on improving performance of NVDA in Microsoft office applications. Some of the remarkable improvements that Indian team contributed to NVDA include: Added sentence reading command Improved paragraph reading command performance specially with bullets and auto numbering Reading of protected documents in MS word Announcement of suggestions in microsoft outlook in to or cc fields Improvements of speech output in spell check dialogue box Reading of status bar im all office 2010 applications Etc... This list is growing fast and we can all appreciate that how important these features are for us. More important is that we now have developers who are very willing to listen to us and work on what we think are most important features for us in our jobs or educational environments. For example, One major reason due to which I myself was not able to switch to NVDA was that it did not announce auto complete suggestions of mail IDs in Microsoft outlook. Global team had this a very low priority because they always suggested to use thunderbird instead of MS Outlook. I could not make that shift due to my company policy and responsibilities. Indian development team fixed this issue and for past few months I am working very happily full time with NVDA as my full time screen reading software. What this team now wants is that the priorities of bug fixes or new feature requests should be set by the users themselves. So, here comes the opportunity to make a screen reading software work where we find that it is not working. If you would like to report an problem that you are facing use of NVDA or you feel NVDA is not providing information that you need, please report it to: [email protected] Normally there are three releases of NVDA every year. How-ever, if you would like to try out builds of version that NVDA development team in India is releasing, write to Suman with this intension on the e-mail provided above. These releases are issued after every bug fix. These are not ensured for stability and thus only those who would like to test out the new features and provide feedback should get into this mode of using NVDA. Last but not the least, We are getting very close of provide licenses of Eloquence to work with NVDA along with the license of Sangita and Vocaliser voices. Saksham will be providing these licenses in a few weeks to come after testing stability of whole new licensing system. I will also be writing soon about what is being done to add all Indian languages in E-speak TTS. So, keep watch in this area as lot of exciting developments are happening here. Wishing everyone all the best and a happy teacher's day. Dipendra Manocha Register at the dedicated AccessIndia list for discussing accessibility of mobile phones / Tabs on: http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessin dia.org.in Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in Disclaimer: 1. Contents of the mails, factual, or otherwise, reflect the thinking of the person sending the mail and AI in no way relates itself to its veracity; 2. AI cannot be held liable for any commission/omission based on the mails sent through this mailing list.. Register at the dedicated AccessIndia list for discussing accessibility of mobile phones / Tabs on: http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in Disclaimer: 1. Contents of the mails, factual, or otherwise, reflect the thinking of the person sending the mail and AI in no way relates itself to its veracity; 2. AI cannot be held liable for any commission/omission based on the mails sent through this mailing list..
