Hi guys,
I’m sure I’ve written about this before but I don’t think anything came of it.
I would love nothing more than to start developing addons for NVDA – there are
many applications that I use that could do with it, and probably even more that
I’d want to use but can’t because of limited or no accessibility that I’m sure
would also benefit from them.
I am facing a rather big problem though, in that the available resources seem
to be very limited and vague on the subject. The developer’s guide, the only
document that has come close to describing addon development, only has two
sections dedicated to the subject and even those seem to assume a good working
knowledge of both Python, and the NVDA source code, neither of which I have.
I have seen a lot of people, on here and elsewhere, simply request that someone
help them to learn Python, whether that be interactive teaching or even
recommending a comprehensive article. I totally understand that this is not the
job of any one person and can also understand why this may be irritating. On
the other hand, I believe there are frustrations on both sides and what is
difficult is pinpointing the exact issue at hand. For instance, having read
several Python resources I am still unsure as to whether it is Python I am
struggling with, or writing addons or understanding code specifically for NVDA.
With this in mind, I want to guide you through my thought processes as I read
the appropriate material, but I am thinking that it would exceed the size limit
for the list, so I have created an article and uploaded it to my website. It is
an HTML document in a zip file (it is not publicly linked to on my site, nor
did I want its text to be searchable by a search engine in case there was a
large gaping hole that I missed that makes this article totally invalid).
Given that there are public archives available for the list, I think it best
not to link to it here. So for now if anyone is interested in reading through
it and perhaps going through things step by step with me, or would be
interested in helping me to create some more meaningful resources, whether it
be a tutorial or a document that points to relevant information etc, please
email me off list.
Thanks.
Damien.
