Dear members of the NVDA Community around the world:

My name is Joseph S. Lee, one of the contributors to NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) screen reader project and one of the admins of the NVDA International users list. On behalf of NVDA list admins, I’d like to thank you all for your continued support for NVDA, and to thank you users for your continued devotion to NVDA and making it become part of lives of more blind and visually impaired users around the world.

As we the NVDA community is in the midst of a celebration of ten years of screen reading excellence, and to upgrade the user support experience of NVDA and for ease of list management, members of the NVDA International list have agreed to move our users list from Freelists to Groups.IO. Founded in 2014 and currently operating in live beta, Groups.IO provides features not found in Freelists, such as calendar events and periodic notifications, group wikis powered by Markdown, polls, databases, integration with services such as Dropbox, Github and others and more. This service also makes it easier to search list archives from the web interface, hashtags for ease or archiving, streamlined list subscription process, RSS feeds and subgroups (focus groups for specialized topics). Most importantly, the staff at Groups.IO are committed to accessibility out of the box, and much work has gone to make list management, web interface and other features accessible to list admins and members who are screen reader users. Although Freelists provides more advanced control over list management, we the members of the NVDA users list believe that Groups.IO provides long-term benefits thanks to accessibility commitments and features listed above.

Thus, effective immediately, the Freelists version of NVDA users list (www.freelists.org/list/nvda) is hereby declared obsolete, replaced by Groups.IO forum (http://groups.io/g/nvda). This does not mean the old list will cease to function now – the lights will be turned off by end of April to allow easy transition to those going to Groups.IO. Nor all members will be added to new list right away – an invitation will be sent to Freelists members to join the new (official) list.

The specifics are as follows:

·         Effective immediately, no new members will be admitted to Freelists list. Various websites, mostly NVDA Community Wiki will be edited to point to the new list URL.

·         To subscribe to the new (official) list, send an email to nvda+subscribe@groups.io (no subject line required, please confirm if requested).

·         For those who find that they cannot subscribe via email, an “instant switchover service” will be provided where you’ll be added to the list by administrators (note that this is a limited time offer; applications will be accepted until March 15, 2016, and instant switchover will occur starting from March 5, 2016). If you do need to take advantage of this service, please contact NVDA list admins at nvda+owner@groups.io before the offer expires.

·         List traffic on the old list will be halted on March 31, 2016. This is required in order to smoothly transfer Freelists archives to Groups.IO.

·         The sunset date for Freelists list will be May 1, 2016. Prior to that, a few last-minute messages will be sent to Freelists subscribers. Anyone left on the sunset date will be removed from the Freelists list.

We the members of the next generation NVDA International Users List are thrilled and look forward to serving the NVDA community through the new list for years to come. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Joseph S. Lee

Translator, code contributor and community add-ons reviewer, NVDA screen reader project (www.nvaccess.org)

Moderator, NVDA International Users List (http://groups.io/g/nvda)

Chair, NVDA Tenth Anniversary Planning Committee (http://groups.io/g/nvdacon)

On Mar 2, 2016, at 9:28 PM, Pete <emac00@cogeco.ca> wrote:


Hi, looks like I'm here.
Pete

Howdy, I'm here to.

Hello all,

 

First, thank you all for joining the next generation NVDA International users list.

 

The leadership team would like to receive feedback from beginning NVDA users regarding the following:

 

2016 is a special year for NVDA users: NVDA turns ten. To celebrate this, some members of the community are organizing a huge online conference around NVDA’s tenth birthday: NVDA Users and Developers Conference (NVDACon for short), to be held in April 2016.

 

NVDACon is an annual gathering of NVDA users and developers to talk about current state of NVDA development. Topics have included math support, braille enhancements, supporting Windows 10, web browsing, Google applications and more. This year, to coordinate NVDACon 2016, several members of this list, together with outside supporters and NV Access formed a planning committee to discuss planning and logistics of this online conference.

 

One of the suggestions considered by organizers is a session or two devoted to beginners. The goals of these sessions are to introduce you to NVDA and its features, understanding concepts such as NVDA menu, object navigation, web browsing and others, an introduction to add-ons and more. Because organizers would like to receive feedback from many fellow community members, we’d like to ask you to send in your suggestions to the committee by either contacting committee members (Nimer, I, Derek Riemer and others), or sending an email to nvda+owner@groups.io with the subject line of “NVDACon 2016” and the admins will forward it to the committee for consideration during our next meeting (sometime in March). Also, even if you are not a beginner (or consider yourself a power user), more suggestions, the better, so we’ll accept suggestions from you as well. The deadline for receiving your email will be March 14, 2016 (shortly before Accessible World Tek Talk event on NVDA and NVDACon) so we can discuss your comments and finalize the schedule by early April.

 

Thank you, and the NVDACon Planning Committee are looking forward to considering your comments.

 

Sincerely,

Joseph

 

Joseph S. Lee

Moderator, NVDA International users forum (http://groups.io/g/nvda)

Chair, NVDA Tenth Anniversary Planning Committee (http://groups.io/g/nvdacon)

 

P.S. For all NVDACon related communication, including a general invite to be sent to this list in April, please use #NVDACon hashtag. Thanks.

Hi, looks like I'm here.
Pete

Hello,
Just testing to see if I am still here.

Regards,
Greg Wocher

On 3/2/2016 9:28 PM, Pete wrote:

  Hi,  looks like I'm here.
  Pete