Dear NVDA community,

 

In 2017 I created a subgroup in NVDA users list designed to teach NVDA development basics to potential developers. Due to restrictions placed at that time, the lessons archive was only visible to subgroup members.

 

After feedback from members, I’d like to announce community-wide release of these lessons on my website (a text file but formatted in Markdown format), which can be found at:

https://www.josephsl.net/files/nvdadocs/nvdadevlearning.txt

 

Important things to note:

 

1. Some unit 1 and 2 lessons are not included. Unit 1 talks about how to fetch NVDA source code, compile it, and run it NVDA from source for the first time, all of which can be found in NVDA’s source code readme (or on GitHub).
2. The development subgroup is currently learning unit 5 (code contributions).
3. Some of what I say in these lessons might be out of date. I’ll eventually put up a repo on my personal GitHub account that folks can clone and make changes to (and submit as a pull request).
4. The content in there should cover majority of development scenarios. As of now, browse mode, display model, and character processing are major lessons missing from unit 4.

 

P.S. If you are looking for a sample material as to how one would do technical writing, or incorporate this lessons archive somewhere in teaching people about screen reader history and what not, I hereby give you permission to do so (attribution is what I ask, and if you can, donation to NV Access is highly appreciated).

 

Thank you.

Cheers,

Joseph