2019.1

Highlights of this release include performance improvements when accessing both Microsoft word and Excel, stability and security improvements such as support for add-ons with version compatibility information, and many other bug fixes.

Please note that starting from this release of NVDA, custom appModules, globalPlugins, braille display drivers and synth drivers will no longer be automatically loaded from your NVDA user configuration directory. Rather these should be installed as part of an NVDA add-on. For those developing code for an add-on, code for testing can be placed in a new developer scratchpad directory in the NVDA user configuration directory, if the Developer scratchpad option is turned on in NVDA's new Advanced settings panel. These changes are necessary to better ensure compatibility of custom code, so that NVDA does not break when this code becomes incompatible with newer releases. Please refer to the list of changes further down for more details on this and how add-ons are now better versioned.

New Features

• New braille tables: Afrikaans, Arabic 8 dot computer braille, Arabic grade 2, Spanish grade 2. (#4435, #9186)
• Added an option to NVDA's mouse settings to make NVDA handle situations where the mouse is controlled by another application. (#8452)
  • This will allow NVDA to track the mouse when a system is controlled remotely using TeamViewer or other remote control software.
• Added the `--enable-start-on-logon` command line parameter to allow configuring whether silent installations of NVDA set NVDA to start at Windows logon or not. Specify true to start at logon or false to not start at logon. If the --enable-start-on-logon argument is not specified at all then NVDA will default to starting at logon, unless it was already configured not to by a previous installation. (#8574)
• It is possible to turn NVDA's logging features off by setting logging level to "disabled" from General settings panel. (#8516)
• The presence of formulae in LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice spreadsheets is now reported. (#860)
• In Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, browse mode now reports the selected item in list boxes and trees.
  • This works in Firefox 66 and later.
  • This does not work for certain list boxes (HTML select controls) in Chrome.
• Early support for apps such as Mozilla Firefox on computers with ARM64 (e.g. Qualcomm Snapdragon) processors. (#9216)
• A new Advanced Settings category has been added to NVDA's Settings dialog, including an option to try out NVDA's new support for Microsoft Word via the Microsoft UI Automation API. (#9200)
• Added support for the graphical view in Windows Disk Management. (#1486)
• Added support for Handy Tech Connect Braille and Basic Braille 84. (#9249)