NVDA: A Free Alternative to Screen Readers

It’s amazing how a software application can change the lives of people who are blind or have visual impairments. But this is exactly what screen readers do. These programs provide blind and visually impaired people a way to use a commodity which sighted people often take for granted – the computer.

Yet as useful and life-changing as they are, screen readers can be very very costly. If you want to purchase one of the screen readers in the market, you should be ready to spend hundreds even thousands of dollars. But there, however, is a free alternative screen reader known as NVDA. Let us take a look at what NVDA is and what makes it unique from other screen readers.

What is NVDA?

NVDA stands for NonVisual Desktop Access. It is a free screen reader developed by NV Access, an organization focusing on applications for the blind and visually impaired.

For those who are new to screen readers, these are programs that acquire textual information on the screen and provide it to the user in a specific output. The output can be a semi-human, semi-robotic voice that reads the information. It can also be read by blind users through devices known as Braille displays.

NVDA runs on Windows operating systems. You have the option to install NVDA on your computer or run it without installation using a CD or a USB thumb drive. Currently, NVDA supports more than 20 languages.

What Makes NVDA Unique?

Apart from being free to download and use, NVDA is also an open source program. This means that NVDA’s developers provide to the public the source code used in the software. So if you, for instance, have a background in computer programming, you can download NVDA’s source code. This quality has attracted many groups to join the NVDA community and contribute to NVDA’s improvement and development.

NVDA is also emerging rapidly. The NVDA community is very active in improving and enhancing NVDA. As a result, you would regularly find updates and new versions of NVDA.

Another notable quality of NVDA is that it works well with the latest versions of the most popular applications. If you, for example, use Mozilla Firefox, you would see that NVDA can help you easily navigate through web sites without viewing the screen.

This in turn results to a larger group of users. There are blind persons who previously used a particular screen reader but are now switching to NVDA. Many new screen reader users find NVDA useful and decide to stick with it. It is also a great cost effective alternative in developing countries.

Conclusion

NVDA is relatively young compared to other screen readers and it is not produced by a large company. As such, NVDA still has fewer features than other commercial screen reader applications. It does, nonetheless, provide a free alternative to blind and visually impaired people who just want to make use of the computer and access information they have the right to enjoy. It is growing and developing very rapidly, and holds great potentials in the future for blind and visually impaired people.

To download a copy of NVDA, you can visit the NVDA web site.

Have you used NVDA before? If you haven’t, please take the time to try it out, and tell us what you think.