The Blind Bargains Suite almost needed an adjoining room to fit all the participants from NV Access involved with this interview. Mick Curran (Executive Director and founder), James Boreham (General Manager), Reef Turner (Developer and Quentin Christensen (Training & Support Manager take J.J. on a whirlwind tour of the newest features of NVDA. braille display auto detection, enhanced support for Office 365 through UI Automation and the ability to use the Windows 10 One Core voices are highlighted at the top of this discussion. The conversation then turns to a more candid look at how the move away from Python 2 will impact add on makers, the challenges in supporting older operating systems and how a more rapid release schedule can be a double edged sword. The team also talks about their view on competition in the market and detail which synthesizer is the most popular amongst the program s users. please be sure to donate, or purchase the training materials mentioned, as it keeps the lights on, but it additionally allows the team to come and network at events like CSUN. To learn more, or to read the In Process blog, visit the NV Access website
CSUN 2019 coverage is Brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
For the latest news and accessibility information on mainstream and access technology, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offerings, access technology book reviews, and mobile apps, and how they can enhance entertainment, education and employment, log on to AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind's free, monthly, online technology magazine. Visit www.afb.org/aw.
Transcript
We strive to provide an accurate transcription, though errors may occur.
Hide transcriptTranscribed By Grecia Ramirez
Direct from Anaheim, it’s blindbargains.com coverage of CSUN 2019, brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
For the latest news and accessibility information on mainstream and access technology; Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offerings; access technology book reviews and mobile apps and how they can enhance entertainment, education, and employment, log onto AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind’s free monthly online technology magazine, www.afb.org/aw.
Now, here’s J.J. Meddaugh.
J.J. MEDDAUGH: CSUN 2019 in the Blind Bargains suite. And one of the things that I look forward to doing every other year or so, it seems, is bringing on the evolving and growing team from NV Access. Good to have you all back on the podcast.
MICK CURRAN: Thank you.
JAMES BOREHAM: Thank you.
QUENTIN CHRISTENSEN: Thank you.
REEF TURNER: Thank you.
JM: So actually, why don’t we go around and have you all introduce yourselves instead of me trying to do it, and then, we could go from there, starting with Mick, who, of course, has been around since the beginning.
MC: Yeah. Okay. So my name is Mick Curran, and I’m Executive Director of NV Access. And – yeah. I’ve been here right since the beginning, being – doing NVDA development. Started it 12 years – 13 years ago in April.
QC: I’m Quentin Christensen. I’m the Training and Support Manager. I’ve been here for – what – four, five years now?
MC: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
QC: Yeah. This is my fourth CSUN, so yes.
MC: Yes.
JB: I’m James Boreham. I’m the General Manager. I started five months ago, so this is my fifth month on the roll. So yes.
RT: I’m Reef Turner. I’m a software developer, and I’ve been with NV Access for two and a half years now.
JM: So actually, we’ll come back to you for a second, James, before we get into the NVDA latest features and things. You are new to the team?
JB: Sure.
JM: Last time, we had Jamie here. Of course, he’s now with Mozilla. So yeah. So expect a podcast for that. But what is your role exactly with NV Access, James?
JB: Sure. So as General Manager, I’m responsible for the operations, the finance, risk management, business planning, and strategy in conjunction with the NV Access and the board. And also looking at ways that we can ensure that NVDA and NV Access is sustainable for long-term. So, you know, when your role’s new, it’s focused on making sure the organization’s sustainable. We got presences in places it’s allowed, you know. Mick and Reef do dedicate more time towards the development side and, you know, also for us to explore another number of opportunities that we’re looking to drive the organization’s sustainability.
JM: Okay. We might get into that a little bit later on as well.
JB: Sure.
JM: But let’s talk about some of the features that have came – come in in the past couple of years. What are some of the big highlights?
MC: I think some of them would be -- Braille Display audio detection is one. Very popular. So the ability to pretty much plug and play Braille Displays in NVDA. You know, if you unplug one Braille Display, plug in another, you don’t have to go to the Braille settings dialogue and choose the particular driver. Most Braille drivers will now automatically detect. That includes Bluetooth and USB.
We’ve done a lot of work, of course, with Mozilla Firefox because, of course, Firefox has been through a few things in the last few years because of Firefox quantum and things like that. We’ve had to change a few things, you know, and work closely with Mozilla to ensure that we can maintain the good, sort of, performance that people are used to with Firefox. We’ve also worked, of course, you know, in enhancing our support for Google Chrome and things like that.
But at the same time, we’re always looking at making sure that our support for Microsoft Office is topnotch, especially in terms of performance and things like that. And, again, we can probably get into that a little bit later in more detail.
JM: Actually, let’s talk a little bit about Office, because there is a big change that you are making to try to get a little more direct information and enhance the experience in – especially of Microsoft Word currently. How is that working?
MC: So – yes. There’s, sort of, two projects going on, I suppose. Microsoft has, sort of, put a lot of time and investment into exposing their new UI automation Accessibility API via Microsoft Office. And this is really exciting because it’s something new and provides really good performance and, you know, it promises really good things into the future with Office and other Microsoft apps. So on one side, we are looking at making sure that we work really well with UI automation, and there is now an experimental feature in NVDA you can turn on in the advanced panel of NVDA settings – this will be in 2019.1. The beta is already out. You can turn this on, and you can use UI automation support in Microsoft Word. You’ll – when – if you do turn that on, at least in Office 2016 in 365, you will notice some massive performance improvements in Microsoft Word because we’re no longer using, sort of, the old Office object models and things like that. We’re just using UI automation, which is a lot faster and things like that. So that’s really exciting.
But also though, of course, you know, not everyone is running Office 2016 or Office 365. So we’ve done -- especially in the last few months – done a lot of work to try and enhance the performance of our existing Microsoft Word support, because although we’ve had Microsoft Word support for many, many years, we’ve added more and more features, you know, over the years and it’s become slower and slower. And so we wanted to sort of step back and really try and tighten things up. And we’re hoping that NVDA 2019.1 will – you’ll really notice some performance changes, whether you’re using the new UI automation support or the older object model support.
JM: So for someone who is running Office 2016 or 365, do you recommend that they enable the checkbox until things go wrong, or what’s the best approach?
MC: I think they should enable it. It certainly -- if they’re on the latest Office build. So – and most people would be. They would get updates every month from Microsoft Office, but there may be some situations, perhaps in a corporate environment, where they may have installed Microsoft Office from physical media where, for some reason, Microsoft doesn’t normally sit, you know, it to – to get monthly updates. So you may find that the UI automation support in there may not be as -- as complete. So I would say certainly give it a go, test it out, give us feedback where you can, if there is something, you know, amiss or we’ve missed something, let us know and we can enhance it even further.
JM: Are there advantages at this point to being on the Office 365 product versus 2016? And, of course, you get the updates and things like that.
MC: Yes.
JM: But are there other advantages?
MC: No, I don’t think so. I think it’s -- really, just is the updates. And Microsoft has really changed the cadence at which they’re developing this software, both for Windows and for Office, you know. We used to – you know, years ago, we’re all used to Windows coming out once every three or four years, and even Office, you know, two or three years. Nowadays, it’s every month. So you really want to be receiving those updates because they’re moving really quickly.
JM: That must present a bit of a challenge as well, new – two versions of Windows a year, essentially, and new features coming out. Is that a big challenge trying to keep up with that or has the transparency that Microsoft has been offering in recent years helped you?
MC: It certainly a challenge because we do need to still support at least Windows 7. I’m trying to remember back to when we had the last conversation, I think we were still supporting Windows XP. But later that year, in 2017, we dropped XP support. But yeah. We’re still supporting Windows 7 and Windows 8 and 8.1. But I suppose – yes. The transparency of Microsoft, the Windows Insider program, all that kind of stuff – it’s a new Microsoft. It really is. They’re a lot more open and willing to work with partners. It’s really, really wonderful to see. And so we try and work together the best way we can to make a really, really good experience on the, you know, the latest Windows 10 and Office 365 but try not to leave behind, you know, the other people as well.
JM: What about emerging Braille Displays and other, more modern displays? I’m seeing everything from the Orbit 20 to the multiline displays that are coming out.
MC: So we have had support for the Orbit Reader for quite some time now, and so it’s great to see that that’s, you know, starting to come out on to the market. It’s really going to make a difference, you know, wonderful price point. And then, of course, yeah. You have things like the Canute multiline Braille Display, you have the Graphiti from APH, and we’re really excited about all of those things. And you know, when we have the time and resources and, you know – we like to play with those kinds of things, and we have good relationships with all of those companies. And, you know, we’re trying to find the time to prototype some things. It’s all very, very new for all of us. Multiline Braille is very new to screen reading, and I don’t think anyone knows what the right answer is just yet. I think we’re still in the prototype days, and you know, we’ll see what works, but we’re really, really excited for the future, I think.
JM: How do you determine what becomes a feature of NVDA and what should remain as an add-on for someone who wants additional functionality? I know there’s debates about little things, for instance, Emojis and things like that, which now became a core feature. How do you make those decisions?
MC: It’s really hard. I think that it’s, sort of, whether we’re willing to take on that, you know, the maintenance of it forever, really; isn’t it? You know, and whether we’re confident that we understand the code and everything that’s being submitted. But what – I think we would like to see as many things in the core as possible, because I don’t think it’s necessarily an argument about size. We’re talking about small pieces of code here. Unless, of course, we’re talking about some kind of optional speech synthesizer or something like that. They can be extremely large, obviously. You know, something like Vocalizer, you know, 2- or 3-gig voice, possibly. You know. But, yeah. We’re very open to bringing things into the core as long as we understand it and as long as we have good conversations with the original add-on author.
So we are looking into things, you know, obviously, you know, the more popular add-ons, we’re always talking about how we can integrate them when we can.
JM: And I noticed you’re doing some things as far as add-ons. What are some of the things you are working on as far as ensuring that add-ons stay up to date, that are being vetted, because they’re never used to be add-on repositories and things like that? And it seems like you’re trying to centralize that a little bit more.
MC: Yeah. Reef, do you want – or do you want me to – yeah.
RT: Yeah. So with the add-ons, we’re – so we’re trying to be prepared for the future of NVDA and make sure that going forward, users get the best experience with add-ons as possible. And, you know, we have a few projects upcoming that are likely to require add-ons to be updated and so on, so to ensure that stability for users, we’re – we’ve introduced add-on compatibility check. So this is something that will hopefully intervene and make sure that an incompatible add-on doesn’t cause someone’s system to become unstable or, you know, cause them problems that aren’t so obvious, give them a warning beforehand.
JM: Thinking about other new features that have come out since we last recorded, one other one that jumps out at me – maybe it seems small to some people -- but using the Windows 10 voices as default. Now, I know eSpeak becomes a nice contentious point of conversation. You know, there are some that love it, and then there are others that have other opinions, so making that change might make it a little more amenable for new users.
MC: Yeah. I think we’re really, really happy that we are at a point with those Microsoft voices that we do feel comfortable enough to make them the default. Microsoft, I think, partly through making their own screen reader, Narrator, they received a great deal of feedback about their voices. And they had a – to be honest, a very hard look at their own position and, you know, worked out what was really the problem there. And everyone was telling them it was, you know, the performance of the voices and the quality of the voices. So they invested a lot of time and money into these new Microsoft voices, and so because they have done such a good job, you know, we’re silly not to take advantage of that because they’re built into Windows 10.
I mean, we’re talking about more than 60, possibly 100 different languages, I think. The goal, really, is that every language supported by Windows will have at least one voice now. And that is so good to see that Microsoft is doing that. I mean, you know, you have NVDA -- Arabic, Hebrew, whatever, these voices are all now available. So no matter what language you speak and you, you know, install NVDA, by default, you’re going to get a, you know, fairly good quality voice in that language and you don’t need to rely on eSpeak as much.
You know, I still personally use eSpeak because it’s very performant and very predictable. But we full well know that, you know, not everybody likes eSpeak. They want a more human-sounding voice, and that’s perfectly fine. But we just always avoided that in the past because we didn’t believe there was an acceptable option. But now there’s one, and we’re very happy to use that.
JM: Speaking of options, let’s talk about Narrator for a second, because NVDA, over the years -- one of the big draws to NVDA was it was the one free screen reader –
MC: Uh-huh.
JM: -- that actually worked. There was Narrator, but it was never very functional until more recently –
MC: Uh-huh.
JM: Of course, Microsoft has made a lot of strides in Narrator. So how has that affected you, or does it matter?
MC: I don’t think it – so I think there’s a few answers to that. I mean, the first one, certainly for me personally -- you know, what’s driven me over the years is just simply to make sure that blind and vision impaired people can use Windows for no more cost than a sighted person; right? And with, you know – whether that be NVDA or it be Narrator, frankly, I don’t really care, you know, as long as there’s an option there. And, you know, NVDA has been – played that role for a very long time. Now, Narrator is starting to play a role too. So I fully support that, and in fact, a lot of the work that NV Access does with Microsoft is around consulting. And a lot – and vast majority of that work directly helps Narrator. It helps NVDA too, but it directly helps Narrator, and we don’t shy away from that at all.
I think, though, at the same time, competitorship is very, very important because it stops the industry from stagnating, and, you know, we’ve seen, I guess other situations that have stagnated, perhaps because there aren’t third-party assistive technologies on particular operating systems, and we don’t want to see that happen to Windows. So we’re around for the long-term because – and there are –
There probably always will be things that NVDA will do that Narrator won’t. Obviously, NVDA’s far more configurable, it has different, I guess modality of doing things that some people like over the way that Narrator does things. So we have slightly different philosophies and ways of doing things, and I think there’s room, definitely, for all of us. So we’ll see how things play out. But I think NV Access, you know, whether we’re doing NVDA or whether we’re just doing direct consulting for Microsoft or other companies, we certainly have a very important role to play as a nonprofit in this industry.
JM: James, you might have some insight on this or whoever wants to take the question, but NVDA’s proliferation over the years has grown quite a bit, especially among mainstream users. One of the hardest nuts to crack is getting into institutions, into other corporate environments where some people are actually against installing open-sourced software. They are against that. How do you overcome something like that, or what efforts have you made to try to penetrate those areas?
JB: So what we’re looking to do is roll out a formal partnership network. So this is something that’s a strategic decision made by the organization. It’s what the combined outcome of meeting the users’ needs -- what we’ve spoken about -- but also working closely with local partners or on the ground in different countries and locations that have relationships with existing users; understand the local ecosystem, the -- you know, the environment in terms of opportunities for provision of services; the demand for NVDA; have relationships with education institutions, governments, corporates; and building a relationship where there’s a mutually beneficial partnership formed between NV Access and that local organization. And we provide them with an agreed support package, and that way, there’s – the possibility to provide – meet that need within corporates and governments and education institutions. So they can then confidently go to those particular organizations and less tolerant organizations and say, we’ve got a commercial license with NV Access, we’ve got a support process in place. There's capacity there to make sure that if it is implemented within your company, within your school, within your university. There's a process there to make sure that we can meet your needs in terms of service, support, training – it meets all those needs. So that’s one of the key things that we’re looking to roll out.
So it has that combined outcome of making sure that NV Access and NVDA is sustainable, as well as meeting the needs of their users and recognizing the important role that our partners play around the world. So I think it’s an exciting time, it’s interesting, you know, I think we’ve had some really constructive conversations before CSUN and at CSUN. I’m excited – we’re all excited about the opportunity that lies ahead to maximize our impact, to increase our relationship on the ground. I think we have a certain capacity, we can do a lot, and we punch above our weight, but the reality is that only our partners have those relationships with the users on the ground, understand those particular needs and circumstances in those locations, whether it be in Europe, whether it be in Asia, whether it be in the States – you know, even in Australia. So the reality is that this is a good approach, I think it has the best outcome for a number of reasons. And I think we’ll start steadily. We want to make sure we get it right. It’s important to take our time. We’re thoughtful and considerate, but I’m excited about the opportunity. I’m confident we’ll have a good outcome for everyone.
JM: Would you consider, or have you considered, doing what some other open-source projects do and having a different, slower, release cycle for certain corporate environments that don’t want to be updating every couple months?
JB: I think we’ll consider it on a needs basis.
JM: Uh-huh.
JB: I mean, I don’t know if you’ve got something you want to add there, Mick, but –
MC: We’ve certainly talked about it internally.
JB: Uh-huh.
MC: It’s certainly not off the table at all.
JB: Uh-huh.
MC: I think it possibly may require – yeah. This kind of thing may require that kind of thinking. Possibly. Yeah.
JM: Well, you mentioned support and training. I’m not going to let Quentin sit there and do nothing.
That was an effort that was getting going the last time we talked, and I’m sure it’s expanded quite a bit since then. What are you working on as far as helping users use the product?
QC: Yup. So we’ve got the basic training for NVDA. I think it’d been available for a little while when we last spoke.
MC: Yup. Uh-huh.
QC: That has been very popular. And we’ve made an effort to keep that updated. So we’ve only just recently updated that most recently again. We’ve also got the Microsoft Word with NVDA, Microsoft Excel with NVDA. We’re about to release Microsoft Outlook with NVDA, which has been long asked for.
MC: Uh-huh.
QC: And another big thing that we have done since we last spoke was the Certified Expert program. So once you’ve – well, you don’t have to have bought the basic training with NVDA, but it certainly helps. But once you feel you’ve got enough knowledge, you can sit – it’s an online exam. It should take about an hour.
MC: Uh-huh.
QC: And once you’ve done that, you have the opportunity to purchase the certification, which both gives you a beautifully hand-crafted certificate that you can print. And also, it gives you a listing on our certified experts list, which we and others refer to when looking for local people with knowledge to perhaps provide individual on-site training that obviously, the small group of us around the table aren’t able to provide worldwide.
JM: What are some of the things looking forward, some of the cool features that you are exploring, or the pipeline?
MC: I think we’re very much, at the moment, looking – we’re actually, sort of, stepping back and looking at performance and stability and things like that at the moment. We currently did – we very recently did a survey of users, asking their, sort of, two top issues. Because although, you know, obviously, we’re an open-source project and we receive -- people open issues with us on GitHub and things all the time. But, you know, at any one given time, we can have more than two thousand issues open, and it’s very hard to prioritize that kind of work.
So we did a quick survey, asked people two top issues, and the vast majority, it was around performance and especially in Microsoft Office. So that’s why we, sort of, you know, made such an effort very recently to address a lot of that kind of stuff. I think that kind of stuff is going to go on into the near future.
But some of the other stuff that, perhaps, Reef sort of alluded to in regards to the possibility of breaking add-ons, this is work that we have to – we’ve put off for a very long time. And this is work, such as switching from the Python 2 programming language to the Python 3 programming language. We want to do this because -- partly because Python 2 itself will no longer be supported next year, and that means we would, you know – that brings up security concerns and things like that. So we need to move. There’s also the advantage that there’s a lot, you know, newer developers now coming through the system that have learned Python 3 and don’t want to learn an older language merely for contributing to NVDA.
So there are some of the reasons we’re going to do that, but it is going to mean that some of the add-ons will – add-ons sort of need to be slightly rewritten. But – and also, you know, a lot of internal code to NVDA. But it also gives us a lot of other opportunities. It cleans up a lot of things, makes it easier to deal with various languages and provides some more exciting, sort of, programming paradigms and things that will enable newer features.
Another thing we’re talking about is this project we keep calling Speech Refactor, which I’m sure we probably alluded to two years ago --
JM: Uh-huh.
MC: -- when Jamie was here. He did a great deal of work to write this before he left. And this is really to enhance the way we, sort of, process text before it’s sent off to the speech synthesizer in terms of adding earcons, doing alert – putting priority on particular speech messages so -- to better handle, I don’t know, Aria-live regions and alerts and all this kind of stuff. Doing a lot of features that people have requested for many, many years that we literally couldn’t do because of our current infrastructure. So we’re really, you know, ready to put that in place and get that into a release pretty quick because it – all the coding’s done. I mean, we still need to do some testing and things like that. But it is, again, another thing that’s probably going to break, sort of, current add-ons.
Having said that though, we’re, you know -- we’re obviously going to be working very closely with the major third-party synthesizers, add-on manufacturers and make sure that they’re able to update their add-ons, et cetera so that they, you know, they’re ready to release them when we release our, you know, new version of NVDA.
So I think -- yeah. This year is all about performance and infrastructure, really. I don’t think you’re going to see lots and lots of bells and whistles and stuff this year. I think it’s really about looking at where we are, cleaning things up, making sure that we have a really robust product that everyone can rely on.
JM: You know, and a lot of those bells and whistles that you mentioned come down to, if you don’t have the time to do it, finding a developer or someone else or yourself that can figure out how to do it. Of course, you can still accept that code if –
MC: Absolutely.
JM: -- it fits, then –
MC: So we have a really, really strong open-source community. If we count, you know, the contributors and the translators, et cetera. I mean, we’re, probably, more than – hitting on 200 people, I would say, have contributed to NVDA over the years.
I know that Reef, last year at CSUN, was looking at some statistics suggesting that, you know, more than 45 percent, I think, of code –
RT: Yeah. It was just down to half.
MC: That’s right. Yeah. Just down to half of all code added to NVDA comes from contributions – you know, open-source contributions, which is really, really exciting. It’s certainly – NVDA definitely is, and always will be, a community project. And we really, really appreciate, you know, the contributions that are provided by people around the world and – you know, the vast majority of these people are blind and vision impaired – you know, or vision impaired themselves. And that’s really good to see.
JM: Have you guys learned anything surprising or interesting off of the minimal data collection that you started doing that people could opt into as far as statistics and things like that?
MC: Yeah. So we’ve always had some very rudimentary statistics telling us about what operating system people are using, et cetera. So we know that -- off the top of my head, it looks like about 45 percent or something are on Windows 10 now. So Windows 7 is really dropping down. And we can see, obviously, what country people are from, and I think we’ve been through these countries before. They never really – really change. We’re really looking at, like, U.S. and Brazil at the top, and then a lot of the Eastern European countries. And – yeah. That hasn’t really changed.
But what we have been starting to collect – and this is the opt-in kind of stuff -- now is we do track what speech synthesizer and what Braille Display driver you use. And – yeah. That’s been interesting reading. Let’s say that it’s good now. It seems to be leveling out that eSpeak is the most popular synthesizer still, which is great to see. We always believed that. And – but – yeah. But not far behind is certain other synthesizers that we don’t like to talk about, as in Eloquence. So – yeah. It’s interesting reading. Windows ones falls about – I think it might be 18 or 12 percent. I can’t remember. One of those two. But certainly, eSpeak is still, by far, the most popular one.
RT: I think something else we’ve learned is about -- some information about where people are in terms of NVDA updates –
MC: Uh-huh.
RT: -- and I think it’s worth, kind of, mentioning that about 40 something percent were –
MC: Yeah. 45 percent.
RT: -- are on the latest version of NVDA. And there’s lots of reasons why people should consider upgrading if it’s something that you’ve been putting off. I think, Quentin, you were looking at the features that are – that apply to all operating systems?
QC: I was. So a couple of people had mentioned in passing that one of the reasons they didn’t bother updating to the latest version was because they saw that it was just things for Windows 10 users and they were using Windows 7, for instance. So I went through the changes for 2019.1, and I found that only 10 percent of the new features were only applicable to Windows 10 or Office 365 users, and over all of the 47 dot points that we had in changes, updates, new features, only 18 percent fit that category of only being relevant to Windows 10 or Office 365 users.
So there really is something for everybody else as well in the updates, even though sometimes, we do make a – more of a song and dance about the latest new feature that we’ve added for Windows 10 or added support for -- for Windows 10, for instance.
MC: And it was also clear – so it’s clear from our statistics, we were able to see that, you know, only 45 percent are on the latest version. But it was also clear from the user survey we did, a lot of the answers we got back, we could sort of read between the lines in regards to performance and things, the way of explaining their issues, we very well know we fixed particular things, you know, possibly two releases ago. So clearly, a lot of the people filling in that survey were still on older versions as well, and we really can’t do anything about that. You know, if you want the latest and greatest and good reliable performance, you need to upgrade.
QC: Some of the big points in 2019.1 are those performance updates that –
MC: Exactly. Yes.
QC: -- we mentioned for Word and Excel. And from the comments that I’ve got back from people who tried out the beta version – and you can find that from the website – but from people who’ve tried the beta version, they’ve been really blown away by the performance improvements. So if you haven’t tried the latest –
MC: Uh-huh.
QC: -- NVDA lately, give it a go.
MC: We should just briefly talk about Excel, in fact, because that was a very, very big pain point for people, especially in corporates and education institutions. Excel 2016 slash 365, that had a particular bug where using it with NVDA, particular sheets that contained comments or dropdowns, it was pretty much unusable with NVDA because of the performance loss. And that – we worked very closely with Microsoft to find out what was going on there, and both us and Microsoft have addressed, you know, bugs in our own product.
So together, we believe that, at least NVDA 2019.1 now, you’re going to be really, really surprised with the performance in Excel. And we believe that it's now, you know, usable in those particular scenarios where NVDA was unusable.
JM: Before we go, let’s talk a little bit about engagement, the In-Process blog. Who gets to write the blog?
QC: I get to write the blog. Yup.
JM: So how is that experience been and the content that you are including in it? What’s – and how has that been received?
QC: That’s – yeah. It’s been great. We’ve had really good feedback on that. People are engaging with it and enjoying the updates that we give. One thing that I should mention, actually, if you look at the latest In-Process, you’ll find a discount for our shop. So that’s another good reason to read it.
MC: Yes. To celebrate CSUN this year.
QC: Yes.
MC: I think – what are we doing? 10 percent or something?
JB: Yeah. 10 percent.
JM: There we go. Awesome. Well, if people want to get more information, read the blog, if they haven’t downloaded NVDA for whatever reason yet, what’s the best way to get in contact?
MC: You should just go to nvaccess.org, and you can download NVDA there, you can donate if you wish, you can contact us, ask us – yeah – questions, and -- yeah. Or you can look at – find us on GitHub, so github.com/nvaccess/nvda, and you’ll be able to, sort of, join in the developer community, see what’s going on there.
Please file issues with us using that system if you, you know – if you like. Yeah. And join – you know, contribute to the project.
JM: And – yes. I will also emphasize with you, the “donate if you wish,” because donations are how all of you are here –
MC: Absolutely.
JM: -- at the moment. And, you know, doesn’t have to be a thousand dollars or ten thousand. It can be $5.
MC: Uh-huh.
JM: And every little bit helps; right?
MC: Every little bit does, and we –
QC: And for a new user particularly, one other thing to consider – instead of donating for that first time, spend the 30 – what – it’s 30 dollars Australian, it works out to, I think about 21, 22 dollars American?
MC: Yeah.
QC: -- you can buy the training material and get a great in-depth knowledge of how to use the software as well.
MC: That’s right. We’d also, of course, like to thank not only just the donations from users, but the wonderful support from various companies around the world that are keeping us going, specifically Microsoft, Google, and Adobe. All three of them have been very, very generous to us and allowed us to do what we do, and we thank them very much for allowing us to continue to offer NVDA for free.
JM: Thank you, everybody, for coming on. It’s always a pleasure. Appreciate your candidness and your willingness to come on the podcast. We definitely appreciate it.
MC: Thank you.
RT: Thank you.
QC: Thank you.
JB: Thank you for having us.
For more exclusive audio coverage, visit blindbargains.com or download the Blind Bargains app for your IOS or Android device. Blind Bargains audio coverage is presented by the A T Guys, online at atguys.com.
This has been another Blind Bargains audio podcast. Visit blindbargains.com for the latest deals, news, and exclusive content. This podcast may not be retransmitted, sold, or reproduced without the express written permission of A T Guys.
Copyright 2019.
Listen to the File
File size: 52MB
Length: 33:16
- Download the file
- Listen using our Enhanced Accessible Web Player
- Download our Blind Bargains Apps to listen from your phone or tablet
Check out our audio index for more exclusive content
Blind Bargains Audio RSS Feed
This content is the property of Blind Bargains and may not be redistributed without permission. If you wish to link to this content, please do not link to the audio files directly.
Category: ShowsNo one has commented on this post.
You must be logged in to post comments.
Or Forgot username or password?
Register for free
Joe Steinkamp is no stranger to the world of technology, having been a user of video magnification and blindness related electronic devices since 1979. Joe has worked in radio, retail management and Vocational Rehabilitation for blind and low vision individuals in Texas. He has been writing about the A.T. Industry for 15 years and podcasting about it for almost a decade.
