Dear NVDA community,

As some of you are testing NVDA 2017.2 release candidate, I’d like to take a moment to give you an overview of things added, changed, and removed in the upcoming version. Because entries in “what’s new” document might sound a bit technical for many, I decided to write a release notes style post, similar to notes for releases of other screen readers and products.

What’s new in NVDA 2017.2

Highlights: Aria-current support, return of full audio ducking feature in Windows 10 Creators Update, faster response in Edge when navigating by line, UI Automation support improvements, more Unicode symbols added, some deprecated code removed.

Aria-current

Aria-current is a way to markup current step, page, time, date and others on a webpage. For example, when navigating some pages such as Mobile Facebook page, you may encounter phrases such as “current page” or “current time”. NVDA can now detect and announce these attributes when you encounter them.

More Unicode symbols added

NVDA can now announce more Unicode symbols such as fractions such as one-fifths, one-tenth and others.

Significant improvements for Edge

Previously, if you were reading multilingual documents in Edge and configured NVDA to switch languages on the fly, NVDA could not switch languages. This has been fixed. Also, NVDA will respond faster (up to three times faster) when navigating by line in Edge. Lastly, various improvements were added to support Edge better in Windows 10 Creators Update.

Audio ducking makes a full return in Windows 10 Creators Update

In NVDA 2017.1, the “always duck” option was removed when using Windows 10 Creators Update. This option is back in 2017.2.

Deprecated code removed

Various code included in earlier versions of NVDA, such as speech.REASON_ constants and deprecated configuration management functions were removed.

Other enhancements

• NVDA will no longer prevent you from navigating to certain objects where shortcut keys were not defined.
• Two empty spaces are no longer added when displaying keyboard shortcuts for UI Automation controls.
• When issuing read current line command three times, the synthesizer in use will apply currently using language to read text, as well as use character descriptions for characters for certain languages.
• Windows Calculator that ships with Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB are supported.
• NVDA will skip UIA controls marked as layout when performing object navigation with simple review mode turned on.
• Menu items on various websites can be activated in browse mode.
• Various selection issues in browse mode were fixed, including an issue where select all would not work if the browse mode cursor is located on positions other than start of a page.
• Burmese is now a supported language, bringing translations to 51 languages.
• Added basic unit testing framework.

Sneak preview of features under active testing

Note that features below may change as time progresses, and are based on features being tested by alpha snapshot users.

• Windows OneCore voices (Windows 10 only): you can now use Windows OneCore (aka SAPI Mobile) voices directly from NVDA without use of an add-on (listen to various NVDACon 2017 sessions for a sample).
• Search suggestion sounds (Windows 10 and possibly other places): when you type text into edit fields that display search suggestions, you’ll hear a sound when suggestions appear. You can turn this off from Object Presentation dialog. This means you won’t need Windows 10 App Essentials add-on to use this functionality. Listen to NVDACon 2017’s Windows 10 and universal apps with screen readers session for more details (audio to be made available soon).
• Many other small improvements under the hood.

Thanks.

Cheers,

Joseph