NVDA Free Open Source Screen Reader For Windows Reviewed
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- Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2007 19:45:16 -0400
www.magnifiers.org
Sunday, September 30, 2007
NVDA Free Open Source Screen Reader For Windows Reviewed
By Peter Verhoeven
Good news for those who can not pay the price of a commercial screen reader
like Jaws, Window-Eyes or Hal. Also good news for those who want access to any
computer on any place, because NVDA can run from any USB stick. NVDA is a free
open source screen reader for Windows XP and Vista.
NVDA allows the user to find out what is happening on the screen, by querying
the operating system and using a speech synthesizer to output the information.
I several times asked Dolphin why Hal and Supernova does not support the
Firefox web browser. Is it realy so difficult to let a screen reader work with
this popular web browser?
Those working on the open source NVDA screen reader, do not recommend using
Internet Explorer. No, they are recommending Firefox and it realy works great!
With NVDA you can simply read a web page in Firefox by cursoring through the
page, or press insert + cursor down to automatically read aloud the entire web
page.
You can also use NVDA with Internet Exploer, but at this moment activating
links while reading web pages sometimes fails, so Firefox is realy recommended.
NVDA gives you complete access to the Windows operating system by speech. The
level of access is much the same than you know from commercial screen readers.
Also applications like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and
Skype are made accessible and can be used without problems with NVDA.
Commercial screen readers install there own video drivers on your system, often
causing a lot of problems. NVDA does not use any special video driver and can
run from a USB stick.
By default NVDA comes with < a href="http://espeak.sourceforge.net/";>eSpeak
speech synthesizer. eSpeak by itself is also an open source project. Because
eSpeak does not need installation of any driver, it can be installed on a USB
stick.
eSpeak does not sound human and personaly I realy have difficult to understand
it. eSpeak comes in different languages. The quality of the speech highly
depends on local people improving the speech rules of their language. It was
also better if by default the speech rate in NVDA was set much lower, than it
is set now. If you start NVDA for the first time you hear eSpeak in English
speaking very rapid to you and for a lot of people for whom english is not
their native language it is difficult to work with.
But if you don't like eSpeak, on all Windows XP and Vista computers, there is
always a SAPI5 voice available. NVDA supports all SAPI4 and SAPI5 speech
synthesizers. You can select another speech synthesizer via the Synthesizer
option in the Preferences menu.
After you load NVDA the NVDA user interface shows you a menu and a quick start
document with instructions to use NVDA.
The menu bar has three menus: NVDA, Prefrences and Help. The NVDA menu include
the options revert to saved configuration, Save configuration and Exit. If you
select save configuration, NVDA will use the current settings next time.
The Preferences menu include the menu items User interface, Synthesizer, Voice
settings, Keyboard settings, Mouse settings Object presentation, Virtual
buffers and Document formatting.
User interface let you change the language of the NVDA User interface. NVDA
currently has been translated into 11 languages including: Brazilin Portuguese,
Czech, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Slovak,
Spanish, Swedish and Traditional Chinese.
By selecting the synthesizer option in the preference menu, you can switch to a
SAPI4 or SAPI5 speech synthesizer, or use the default eSpeak speech
synthesizer.
By selecting the Voice settings option in the Preference menu, you can change
voice related settings like Voice, speech rate, Pitch, Volume, speak all
punctuation, Raise pitch for capitals, Say cap before capitals and Beep before
capitals.
With the Voice listbox, you can change to another speech synthesizer. For
example if you have more SAP5 speech synthesizers installed on your computer,
you can select SAPI5 in the Synthesizer menu option and select a specific SAPI5
speech synthesizer in the Voice settings menu option.
By choosing SAPI5 in the Synthesizer menu, the default speech synthesizer of
your system will be selected. It is a pity that there is no key combination to
cycle through different voices at this moment..
By selecting the Keyboard settings option in the Synthesizer menu, you can
change the so called modifier key and turn echo typing on and off for
characters and words. By default "Speak typed characters" is on and "Speak
typed words" is off.
The Mouse Settings option in the Prerence menu let you change options like
Report mouse shape changes, Report object under mouse and play audio
coordinates when mouse moves.
In the Mouse settings window we find some new features, that we didn't know
from commercial screen readers. The Report object under mouse is also known as
mouse echo and is not new. In NVDA enabling or disabling this feature seems to
have no effect. While moving the mouse over the desktop nothing is spoken out.
Also moving the mouse over the taskbar or system tray, does not result in
speaking out the objects under the mouse.
But Report mouse shape changes, and play audio coordinates when mouse moves,
are interesting innovations. By selecting the last one you hear by sound where
the mouse cursor is. Is it at the left of the screen, you hear sound in the
left speaker. If it is in the right area of the screen, you hear the sound in
the right speaker. If it is anywhere in the center of the screen, you hear the
sound in both speakers. If it is in the top of the screen the sound is high and
if you move the mouse to the bottom of your screen the sounds become lower.
Also the Object presentation option in the Preference menu, has some nice
options like: Report tooltips, Report help balloons, Report object shortcut
keys, Report object presentation information, Report object group names , Say
object state first and Beep on progress bar updates.
The last one is again innovative. If there is a progress bar on the screen you
can hear by beeping that it is going from 0% to 100%. The tone of the beeping
becomes higher. It sounds a bit like you fill a bottle with water. This feature
is helpful while web pages are loading in a web browser.
The virtual buffers option in the Preference menu give you options to configure
virtual buffers. Virtual buffers are for example used in web browsers to allow
you cursoring through a web page and navigating to objects like links,
graphics, tables and forms.
The Document formatting option in the Preference menu, let you configure if
special document formatting information must be spoken to you like, Font name,
font size, font attributes etc.
By selecting the Help menu on the NVDA menu bar, you can go to the NVDA Home
page, NVDA wiki and to the NVDA about page.
Concluding we can say that NVDA realy is a great screen reader and for common
computer tasks as good as commercial screen readers. The performance of NVDA is
realy excelent. Supernova needs more than a minute to load on my Windows XP
system. NVDA loads in some seconds. Also the performance of speech is much
better than that of most commercial screen readers.
At this moment NVDA does only offer speech support, but support of braille
refreshable displays is planned in the near future.
On the NVDA community page www.nvda-project.org you can participate in the NVDA
open source screen reader project, you can subscribe to a NVDA user list to
share your experiences with other NVDA users and you can help to improve NVDA
itself by becoming a developer or by helping to translate and document NVDA i
other lanbuages.
NVDA is written in Python programming language. Because it is a open source
project you can download the source code of NVDA and participate in the
developement to improve it and add new features to it.
The latest offical release of NVDA was 0.5, but I recommend to download a later
so called snapshot. Maybe these releases are less stable, but include the
latest features. By the way NVDA never crashed my system and after a crash of
NVDA itself I could always simply load it again.
There are two types of downloads a full install version and a zipped version.
The zipped version only needs to be extracted to your computer or to a USB
stick and you can start nvda.exe from the location you extracted it. The
install version, needs an installation process on your system.
NVDA Project Home page:
www.nvda-project.org
On this page you find all information about this project, including links to
more reviews and how to participate.
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