Hello NVDA community,

Welcome to the first weekday of 2023 – or for some, the last day of New Year weekend.

Late last year (toward middle of December 2022), I announced that I will release add-on updates around January 3, 2023, featuring updates requiring Windows 10 or later and NVDA 2022.3 or later. The time has now come to fulfill that promise:

At 02:00 UTC on January 3, 2023 (January 3^rd in the east, January 2^nd across the Atlantic Ocean), I will release updates for the following add-ons: Enhanced Touch Gestures, Event Tracker, GoldWave, Object Location Tones, ObjPad, Resource Monitor, Sound Splitter, and StationPlaylist. These releases are significant because they will now require Windows 10 or later. Just like updates released in December 2022, these updates will be rolled out in phases:

1. Add-on Updater will offer these updates to you at the aforementioned date and time (see below if you are using Windows 7, 8, or 8.1).
2. Community add-ons website: version 23.01 of the mentioned add-ons were queued for distribution on community add-ons website.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

1. All of these updates will require NVDA 2022.3 or later (or if you want, wait until NVDA 2022.4 stable version is released before installing add-on updates).
2. For Windows 7/8/8.1 users: updates to the listed add-ons will be offered via Add-on Updater until January 9, 2023. This is so that you will get to see the installation message for older (and soon to be unsupported) Windows releases. After January 9, 2023, updates to my add-ons will not be offered to folks using unsupported Windows releases if using Add-on Updater (Add-on Updater will continue to be offered to you). Please upgrade to at least Windows 10, preferably to Windows 10 November 2021 Update (Version 21H2) or 2022 Update (22H2), or if possible, to Windows 11.
3. It is possible that these updates will be the one and only versions to support NVDA 2022.3. NVDA 2022.4 will be required for all of my add-ons soon (that will be communicated shortly after 2022.4 stable version is released).

Key changes:

• As mentioned before, these updates require Windows 10 or later and NVDA 2022.3 or later.
• Enhanced Touch Gestures: you can now assign a custom input gesture (preferably touch gesture) to toggle touch keyboard and dictation. Although not documented, from February 2023 release, touch keyboard support will be transferred to Windows App Essentials add-on as touch keyboard is powered by the same application responsible for displaying emoji panel and clipboard history.
• GoldWave: officially removed support for GolWave 5 from the add-on source code (this fact is not documented).
• Resource Monitor: two major changes in addition to updating a dependency used by the add-on. First, on increasingly uncommon single-core systems, NVDA will not announce processor load for each CPU core. Second, when obtaining Windows version information (NVDA+Shift+number row 6), NVDA will now announce the actual name of the processor architecture in use; “32-bit” is now “x86,” “x64” is “AMD64,” and “ARM64” is still “ARM64.” This is a backport of a change introduced in NVDA 2023.1 (under development) that will record processor architecture for the Windows installation at NVDA startup.
• Sound Splitter: updated add-on dependency.
• StationPlaylist: as NVDA 2022.2 and later includes first/last table column commands (Control+Alt+Home/End), there is no need to define commands to move to first/last track column row in playlist viewer anymore, so these commands were removed from the add-on. This is also the first version to require SPL suite 5.40 or later.

Sneak preview of what’s coming in February:

• If released by then, NVDA 2022.4 will be required for all of my add-ons.
• NVDA will present Windows version and build information if attempting to install add-ons on unsupported Windows releases. This is a required change to prepare add-ons to ask you to use newer Windows 10 releases later in 2023, likely from May 2023 onwards.
• Add-on Updater: I’m working on a possible fix for a long-standing issue where Add-on Updater may appear to offer an “update” that is actually an older version of an add-on. This requires parsing and comparing installed versus update versions, and the fix will work best if the add-on version is of the form number.number.
• Windows App Essentials: a development build will be released in February that will test ending support for Windows 10 Version 21H2 and Server 2022.

I will update this thread once the listed add-on updates are released via various channels, beginning with users of Add-on Updater 23.01. I will also list download links for the last add-on releases compatible with Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 in an upcoming post.

Cheers,

Joseph