1. Sajad-Aliraqi,
Do read carefully and participate and celebrate this major assistive technological milestone!
Hello everyone,
My name is Joseph Savant Lee, one of the contributors to NVDA screen reader project, and the Chair of the NVDA 10th Anniversary Planning Committee. On behalf of the Planning Committee, NV Access and NVDA community, I would like to invite you along on a four-day journey in April, celebrating ten years of screen reading excellence and to plan ahead for the future - NVDACon 2016 the 10th Anniversary edition.
On a global village, everyone sets sail on a voyage around the vast sea of information called the Internet. Many people learn more, many people share a lot, and all of us use it to keep in touch with family, friends, colleagues and others.
But, there is a group of people which cannot afford this opportunity, and some of them are the poorest in their countries. The population count of these people; 300 million, and counting. These people, blind and visually impaired - they need a tool to navigate this information ocean, namely, a computer. For many of them, they need an additional tool to navigate this ocean - an assistive technology such as a screen reader; a software package that interprets and presents screen information via synthesized speech or a refreshable Braille display. For many blind people, purchasing a screen reader meant saving up to a thousand dollars or asking government agencies to obtain a license for commercial screen readers.
That changed in 2006, when two brave young men from Australia, who were blind and fascinated by computer technology said,” It isn’t a good idea to deprive blind people from access to information due to high costs of commercial screen readers.” They formed a non-profit charity called NV Access and conceived a brainchild that is now part of lives of over a hundred thousand people around the world. The brainchild’s name was NVDA (Non Visual Desktop Access).
In addition to supporting modern versions of Windows, NVDA comes with support for various apps including office suites, web browsers and web standards, powerful customization tools, translations in over 40 languages, support for extensibility and so on. New features and refinements are being developed by NV Access and the community everyday. Some members of the NVDA community were instrumental in organizing an informal gathering of NVDA community around the world, started in 2014.
2016 is an important year for NVDA. This year we are celebrating NVDA’s 10th anniversary, and to help celebrate this, we are making NVDACon bigger and better. At NVDACon 2016 to be held over two weekends in April, you get a chance to network with many NVDA community members around the world, you get a chance to listen NVDA developers Michael Curren and James Teh talk about NVDA’s past, present and future, you get a chance to network with accessibility advocates and companies such as Microsoft, Mozilla and others, to hear from them on stands on accessibility and their relationship with NVDA and screen readers, you will also get a chance to experience the future with talks such as speech recognition from a third party project, new features and so on, as well as network with authors of various NVDA community add-ons.
So, are you a historian interested in NVDA’s past, present and future and impact on lives of many blind people around the world? Are you a developer of websites and applications seeking to understand how accessibility works and finding ways of improving accessibility of websites, applications and so on as well as network with NVDA developers and users? Are you a visionary looking forward to NVDA’s future and wanted to find out how to promote and participate in this worldwide community and its movement - equal access to technology at no additional cost than sighted peers? Are you an individual or a company who hoping to sponsor NV Access and NVDA through donations, testing or promotions?
If that’s you, we, the members of the NVDA community and NV Access would like to invite you along on a four-day journey to discuss NVDA’s past, present, future impact, as well as network with many people who made NVDA possible for the past ten years - the NVDA Users and Developers Conference NVDACon International 2016 the 10th Anniversary edition April 22nd, 23rd, 29th and 30th to be held online at NVDA Korean TeamTalk server at nvda-kr.org
For more information on NVDACon, visit www.nvda-kr.org/en/nvdacon.php You can also follow @nvdacon on Twitter for more information on NVDACon and related events. Hope to see you at NVDACon 2016 in April!
Thank you very much.
~msgScore~: +0