Introducing Braille Essentials add-on (forked from BrailleExtender)

[joseph....@gmail.com]

Hi all,

I am delighted to introduce a new add-on to the NVDA community: Braille Essentials, available from NV Access add-on store. Braille Essentials, forked from BrailleExtender, aims to be a more modern take on NVDA’s braille support. Featuring tighter integration with NVDA screen reader, Braille Essentials is designed to be a companion for any NVDA braille user.

As a fork of BraileExtender, Braille Essentials shares most of the features of BrailleExtender, including automatic braille scrolling, one-handed mode, representing unknown characters in a more braille friendly format, document formatting presentation enhancements, and much more. However, Braille Essentials does include changes from BrailleExtender, including no more custom add-on updating mechanism (add-on updates are performed through NV Access add-on store) and a more modernized code. In the future, Braille Essentials aims to achieve improved compatibility with recent NVDA releases, including partnership with an upcoming feature in NVDA to perform automatic braille scrolling. Ultimately, the goal of Braille Essentials add-on is to serve as a staging ground for features to be integrated into NVDA screen reader so that, one day, you won’t need the add-on to experience the joys of using NVDA with braille.

 

Changelog:

* Initial forked add-on release.

* NVDA 2024.1 or later is required.

 

Changes from BrailleExtender:

* User interface and documentation now refers to "Braille Essentials".

* Removed add-on version from "Braille Essentials" NVDA menu item.

* Changed add-on homepage and source URL.

* Removed add-on update check feature and update channel options (add-on updates done through the add-on store).

* Remove "website" menu item (add-on website can be opened from add-on store).

* Remove "translation pot file" menu item (no replacement).

 

Note: Braille Essentials 26.05 will be the only release to support NVDA releases earlier than 2025.3.3. The next stable release (June) will require NVDA 2025.3.3 or later for technical and practical reasons (technical: modernize braille handler patches logic and upgrade the add-on codebase to use Python 3.13 syntax and perform code linting).

You can learn more about Braille Essentials and submit issues at:

https://github.com/josephsl/brailleEssentials

Enjoy.

Cheers,

Joseph