NVDA allows blind and vision impaired people to access and interact with the Windows operating system and many third party applications.

Features

  • Support for popular applications including web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, email clients, internet chat software, music players, and office programs such as Microsoft Word and Excel
  • Built-in speech synthesizer supporting over 55 languages, plus support for many other 3rd party voices
  • Reporting of textual formatting where available such as font name and size, style and spelling errors
  • Automatic announcement of text under the mouse and optional audible indication of the mouse position
  • Support for many refreshable braille displays, including input of Braille via braille displays that have a braille keyboard
  • Ability to run entirely from a USB flash drive or other portable media without the need for installation
  • Easy to use talking installer
  • Translated into more than 50 languages
  • Support for modern Windows Operating Systems including both 32 and 64 bit variants
  • Ability to run on Windows logon and other secure screens
  • Announcing controls and text while interacting with gestures on touch screens
  • Optional Telephone Support and comprehensive Training Material available at very low cost
  • Enthusiastic and helpful user community

System Requirements

  • Operating Systems: all 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows 11, and all Server Operating Systems starting from Windows Server 2008 R2.
  • For Windows 7, NVDA requires Service Pack 1 or higher.
  • For Windows Server 2008 R2, NVDA requires Service Pack 1 or higher.
  • Memory: 256 mb or more of RAM
  • Processor speed: 1.0 ghz or above
  • About 90 MB of storage space.

What's New

NVDA 2026.1 Released

This is the longest "Highlights" section of release notes we've had! So, I'm going to let it speak for itself without making it longer:

NVDA 2026.1 includes support for reading math content with MathCAT, which is now built-in to NVDA.

There have been several improvements to speech. Spelling and grammar errors can now be reported with a sound instead of speech when reading. You can now configure NVDA to automatically say all after successfully recognizing content, such as with Windows OCR. NVDA no longer reports the language being read as unsupported when the synthesizer supports the language but not the specific dialect. NVDA now supports 64-bit SAPI 5 voices.

Braille support has also been improved. It now continues to work when switching to a secure screen, like the sign-in screen or User Account Control dialog. NVDA messages from the local computer are now shown in braille when controlling a computer via Remote Access. Spelling and grammar errors, as well as the number of items in a list in browse mode, can now be shown in braille. Other braille bug fixes, including in Microsoft Outlook and LibreOffice Writer, have also been added.

In browse mode in web browsers, NVDA no longer treats controls with 0 width or height as invisible. This may make it possible to access previously inaccessible "screen reader only" content on some websites. Malformed links no longer prevent NVDA from reading content in Google Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers. The browse mode highlighter now appears on content recognition results, such as when using Windows OCR. In Microsoft Word, unassigned Quick Navigation commands to jump to references have been added. They are also now shown in the elements list.

It is now possible to view virus scan results for an add-on from the Add-on Store. For add-ons that include one, you can also view an add-on's changelog. The reliability of background add-on updates has been improved.

A new "Privacy and Security" category has been added to NVDA's settings dialog. The "Logging level" and "Allow NV Access to gather NVDA usage statistics" settings have been moved here from the "General" category. The settings for Screen Curtain have also been moved here from the "Vision" category. Additionally, Screen Curtain's settings are now configuration profile independent.

The NVDA interface is now translated to Cambodian. Liblouis, Unicode CLDR and eSpeak NG have been updated. Added tables for English Grade 3, Japanese (Rokuten Kanji), and Macedonian uncontracted braille. Improved the Biblical Hebrew, Unified English Braille, Greek International, Hungarian, Norwegian, Portuguese 8-dot and Slovakian braille tables. Emoji localizations for Luxembourgish have been added.

There have also been many other bug fixes and improvements.