A guide to the NVDA screenreader

Roberta: Today we have Dr Scott Hollier with us from Media Access Australia to talk about a free piece of assistive technology, the NVDA screen reader. Welcome, Scott.

Scott: Thanks, Roberta. Thanks for having me back.

Roberta: Now, firstly, what is NVDA?

Scott:  NVDA stands for NonVisual Desktop Access, and basically, it’s a screen reader. So people who aren’t familiar with screen readers, that’s when you have a voice on your computer or on your device that will read things out to you if you’re blind. So it helps a lot in terms of navigating around the computer, using the Internet, and yeah, reads out all the information that you need to know to successfully use those things.

Roberta: We’ve come a long way with that one, because there was a time where it could only read certain fonts and things like that.

Scott: That’s it. And now it can read the whole computer.

Roberta: Yeah, great.

Scott: And the web browser and everything.

Roberta: Well, I believe that Media Access Australia has teamed up with the creators of NVDA. Can you tell us about the project?

Scott: Yeah, well, what’s really, really exciting and it’s wonderful to have a chance to share this with the listeners, is that we’ve teamed up with NV Access, who make NVDA, to launch a wiki and the wiki is, basically, a website where people can edit information themself and what’s on that wiki is training resources for NVDA. One of the big problems that people have raised with us is that they want to use NVDA, ‘cause it’s free and it’s a really good product in helping blind people use a computer.  But the main problem has been that there haven’t been a lot of training resources for it. So what we’ve done is we’ve put this wiki online and it has a whole stack of training resources, so that if people want to use Windows and they want to use the Internet, and if they want to use some of the basic applications in Windows using NVDA, then there’s some really good guides to do it.  And because it’s a wiki, it’s our hope that people will come on board and work really hard to update it.  And one of the really important things about this wiki is that we’re aiming at particularly itinerant and visiting teachers.  So people in schools who work with blind children, wanting to help them to get online and access materials in the classroom. They can be involved and really help support those children.

Roberta: The wiki sounds like a great idea, Scott. How can people get involved?

Scott: Well, what I’m saying, the great thing about a wiki is that anyone can go to the website and anyone can update the material. So the web address for the wiki is nvda.wikispaces.org and what I do is really encourage the public to come along to the website, click on the edit button, add in their experiences with NDVA. There’s a huge amount of users out there now, which is wonderful, and we really just encourage people to come to the website, add your extra information, so like, not all the applications that people use are on there at the moment, so if someone out there is, say, using Excel with NVDA and they want to put some instructions on how one who’s blind or vision impaired can use that, then that would be a wonderful thing. So yeah, if the public can come to the website, that would be great.

Roberta: NVDA is a free screen reader, but is it as good as the commercial one, like, JAWS, say, for instance?

Scott: Pretty close, now, which is fantastic. It has evolved at a tremendous pace in the past few years and it’s just recently got to more funding from the Mozilla Foundation, so we’re only going to see better things coming from NDVA.  And the creators of NDVA at NV Access have just worked so hard to put such a great product and to have it out there for free as an open tool screen reader is just tremendous.  So whilst you probably would argue that JAWS is a little more polished as a product, given that the price difference is thousands of dollars, we’d really encourage people to try NVDA and, yeah, especially in that classroom setting, we’re hopeful that this information will provide really good support.

Roberta: Scott, are there any other projects like this planned for the future?

Scott: Media Access Australia have done a number of projects in this area. One of the other projects we did in the recent past is helping seniors with disabilities get access to computers and the Internet and as we’ve talked about before, we’ve also got our social media project coming out to support people with disabilities in getting access to things like Facebook and Skype and other technologies for social interaction, so this is an area that’s very close to our hearts and it’s wonderful to be involved.

Roberta: Well, for more information on screen readers, and assistive technology, visit the digital technology section of the Media Access Australia website. Mediaacess.org.au or give them a call on (02) 9212 6242. Now, that website for NVDA again, please, Scott.

Scott: Yep. It’s nvda.wikispaces.org.

Roberta: That’s pretty simple. That’s nvda.wikispaces.org. Well, I’ve been speaking with Dr Scott Hollier from Media Access Australia and we’ve been talking about an NVDA Screen Reader. Thank you, Scott.

Scott: Thank you.

Roberta: And Media Access Australia are supporters of this programme.