In this episode, James Oates demonstrates “NPR One”, a universal app from National Public Radio, available on all Windows devices. He shows how to start playing NPR with just a simple key stroke on a PC, and a voice command on a Windows Phone. If you enjoy National Public Radio, you will love this app.
Windows
Hey Cortana: Welcome to the PC.
In this episode, James Oates updates us on the status of Windows 10 Technical Preview Build 9926. In this build, Microsoft has added Cortana, an interactive personal assistant, to their operating system. It is currently limited and in its early stages, but it still is very impressive. He also uses Narrator as the primary screen reader, since NVDA and JAWS are still not currently able to work with Universal apps.
An Introduction to NVDA: Basic Navigation
In this edition of CBT, Brandon Cross shows new users of the NVDA screen reader how to navigate the basic elements of a web page. He describes the different ways one can move around, and demonstrates the feedback users can expect.
Levtec Winstaller makes Windows 10 Chatty
With a piece of software called Winstaller from Levtec, one no longer needs to use an answer file for unattended deployment of Windows operating system. This opens up huge opportunities for those of us who cannot see and wish to work in a professional IT setting, or just for fixing our home computers.
Microsoft Launches Office 2016 Touch Preview for Windows 10, Download Here.
Microsoft has launched a preview version of Office Touch, which includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The preview version is available for Insiders running Windows10 Technical Preview in a desktop environment. It can be downloaded for free from the Windows Store, but links will be provided below. These are universal apps, so they will also be available for tablets and phones running Windows10 at a later date. Keep in mind that these are Mobil versions of the applications, and are not intended to replace Office 365 or desktop versions of Office. Office Touch is already available in a final release version for iOS and Android. Links to those applications will be provided below as well.
Yammer Now Supports Handoff for Seamless Mobile Collaboration
Microsoft’s Yammer team announced updates for Yammer mobile apps for iOS and Android.
An Introduction To NVDA: Installing Add-ons
NVDA is a free alternative to screen readers like Jaws and Window-Eyes One of its features- in fact, the one I’ll be covering today- is extensibility. So, how is NVDA extensible? Through add-ons, which are packaged zip files with an .nvda extension that contain the necessary files to add or modify the functionality of NVDA. So, let’s discuss how to download and install add-ons, as well as how to manage them afterward.
Windows Phone8.1 (Part III): Music, Netflix, and Tweetium:
In this episode, James Oates demonstrates how to stream music and play a radio station using an Xbox Music Pass subscription. He shows us how to play a movie on Netflix and pin a favorite TV show to the start screen. Finally, he reviews the accessibility of the popular Twitter client, Tweetium. Throughout the episode, James is relying heavily on Cortana, Microsoft’s personal assistant. Since Cortana is integrated into the Music and Netflix applications, it makes the experience quite simple.
90 Days with NVDA
Introduction
As a visually impaired Windows user, there’s quite a few options out there when it comes to screen reading software for you to choose from… JAWS, Window-Eyes and System Access might be the best known of the commercial screen readers on the market, while in the open-source space there’s one screen reader most visually impaired users have heard of… NVDA, or Non-Visual Desktop Access. While JAWS and it’s brethren are carefully designed, well tested and well supported by their respective creators, they also generally are a bit expensive, especially when factoring in the software maintenance agreements that keep these screen readers up to date. On the other hand, NVDA is a high-quality, open-source and most importantly, free screen reader that I’ve used exclusively for the last 90 days and would highly recommend to Windows users looking for an alternative to the commercial screen readers.
Installing NVDA
When it comes to installation, NVDA is quite straightforward to install, with an installation wizard that walks you through the process with speech, even if no other screen reader is installed on your system. Basically it’s agreeing to the license, clicking a few buttons and clicking Finish when it’s done. Dead simple… and you’re back to your normal routine.
Using NVDA
The experience with NVDA is a bit different than the commercial screen readers, as there’s no special display driver required to make things accessible. NVDA uses the built-in accessibility frameworks in Windows to provide the information it needs to provide spoken feedback of what’s on screen at the moment. What this means is that in some cases, applications that may not have been very accessible under the commercial screen readers might become accessible under NVDA. It’s not always perfect, but I’ve had some applications that I thought were inaccessible using a commercial screen reader become useful to various degrees under NVDA. Your mileage may vary, so don’t be afraid to test out the accessibility of your favorite application.
So, what works well with NVDA? Here’s a short list of applications I use that work quite well, and that you might find useful:
Google Chrome
Mozilla FireFox
Mozilla Thunderbird
Skype
Audacity
PuTTY
WinSCP
There’s more than just these applications, but these are applications I use, and have found to be quite accessible. Unfortunately, not all applications will work with NVDA, but it’s not due to something with NVDA itself, but the fact that whomever develops the inaccessible application didn’t use any of the accessibility frameworks that Windows or NVDA supports, thereby making the application difficult to use by the visually impaired. This isn’t a problem exclusive to NVDA, but it’s common enough to preclude visually impaired Windows users from using some Windows applications.
NVDA and Plug-Ins
Extensibility is a great thing when it comes to screen readers, and NVDA has a modular plug-in system that adds additional functionality to your NVDA installation. Yes, the commercial screen readers are extensible as well, but it’s a bit less intuitive to add extra functionality to them. With NVDA, it’s simple as downloading a prepackaged add-on, double click, and NVDA handles the rest, even offering to restart so the plug-ins you installed are ready to use. There’s everything from add-ons to enhance your favorite applications to speech synths for better sounding spoken feedback and beyond. It’s up to you which plug-ins you want installed, so go ahead and experiment… NVDA also offers an easy way to remove those pesky plug-ins that you don’t need anymore.
Conclusion
If I had to end this article in one sentence, it would be this: NVDA is a high-quality, free screen reader for the Windows platform worth installing. To expand on that, NV Access has done a quite good job with NVDA, and I strongly encourage you to try it out. participate in the community to make it better and donate if you can afford to do so. Happy accessible computing!
Windows10 Build9926 Update Falsely Triggers The Availability Of A New Build.
Once this update is installed, you will see the availability of either build 9931 or 9932. These builds are not available, and will cause you problems if you attempt to install them. It is safe to install the update, and it actually provides significant performance improvement, but do not upgrade to the next build at this time.
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