Hi Susan,

Ah, you brought up important points, and a justification for what I’m about to do soon.

Google applications: there were several seminars/sessions during NVDA Users and Developers Conference (NVDACon) where Google apps were discussed. The most recent one was done by a Google engineer (NVDACon 2017) and talked about what Google is doing to make Chrome and other applications accessible.

You say you’re using Firefox? Which version is it and which NVDA version did you get? I highly recommend using NVDA 2017.3 or later and Firefox 52 or later for improved accessibility to Google applications. Also, bare in mind that Google apps do change from time to time, and in some cases, using Google Chrome (or Microsoft Edge on Windows 10) might offer a slightly better experience.

As for what I’m planning to do: sometime in 2018, I plan to hold a seminar that goes over how to provide a more proper technical support offline. It’ll involve talking about some NVDA internals, as well as common issues and troubleshooting tasks, user-centric questions, etiquette and what not.

Tech support over the phone: as much as I’d like to offer phone support, I’m a college (undergraduate) student and a forensics (speech and debate) competitor, so my schedule is tight. I’m also teaching two related courses on NVDA development (one on Python and another on NVDA internals) along with my Windows Insider duties, so there’s not a lot of time I can devote to phone support. I do agree that as much as online support system is valuable, tech support over the phone is something we cannot forget. I’ll keep an eye out for news on that front and see what can be done.

To the rest of the community: you know what to do: please help a college student by stepping up to this challenge. I don’t want to hear words alone: I want action please.

Cheers,

Joseph