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: sumandog...@gmail.com
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
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