Community proposal: celebrating, reflecting, and envisioning NVDA's past, present, and future together as a community throughout 2026

[joseph....@gmail.com]

Hello NVDA users,

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year for folks celebrating them.

Please circulate the following community proposal throughout the NVDA community (if you want, please do translate them into your languages). While I will be offline from the community for majority of the time in 2026, I will do my best to offer advice in terms of event planning:

 

Proposal: community events to celebrate, reflect, and envision NVDA’s past, present, and future throughout 2026 (NVDA’s twentieth anniversary):

Hello NVDA community,

Hope all of you are doing well and staying safe and healthy.

In a few days we will usher into year 2026. The upcoming year is special for the NVDA community: it is NVDA’s twentieth anniversary, and the NVDA community should come together to mark this occasion by celebrating, reflecting, and envisioning NVDA’s past, present, and future.

Background: in April 2006, an early version of NonVisual Desktop Access was released to the world. In the midst of competition between several commercial (and free) screen readers for Microsoft Windows, NVDA made a mark by being an open-source, free screen reader made by the blind for the blind. For the next twenty years, NVDA and NV Access, the nonprofit in charge of developing NVDA, became a recognized force in the access technology landscape, with numerous awards, sponsorships, and a community of people driving its growth and adoption, including being adopted as a primary screen reader for an upcoming braille-centric computing hardware.

In 2016, I and several NVDA community members organized NVDACon, a weekend of fun and reflection on NVDA’s ten years of service and impact. Starting out as a small screen reader targeting Windows XP in 2006, NVDA became a centerpiece of a community dedicated to equal access to technology ten years later. Not only the screen reader itself became an example of community involvement, things around it such as add-ons, localization, tutorials, and others strengthened NVDA’s ecosystem and its message that people should not have to pay extra to access information anywhere. The 2016 event was global in scale and featured talks from members across countries, languages, and backgrounds, including a keynote from NV Access discussing their reflection and vision for NVDA for years to come.

So, as we approach the twentieth anniversary of NVDA, let us work together as a community to organize events throughout the year celebrating, reflecting, and envisioning NVDA’s past, present, and future. The events can include workshops on submitting bug reports and feature suggestions, a showcase of community add-ons and their development, a collection of video testimonials from community members, in-person or online gathering of community members organized by local communities or on a more global scale, or something creative and memorable. Ideally, the events should happen throughout the year, with some of the memorable ones happening to coincide with NVDA’s twentieth anniversary in April 2026. Or, if we want, let us try resurrecting international NVDACon and make it more modern such as webinars over Zoom and other more modern (and accessible) possibilities.

While many events might be organized at the level of local communities by country or language, I think we should aim to have at least one global scale event in 2026 to celebrate NVDA’s impact in the past, reflect on NVDA’s present strengths and challenges, and collectively envision what NVDA will be for the next five years or so. While I may not be able to coordinate various events including the global event I envision happening later in 2026, I will be available should any NVDA community seek advice on event planning and organization.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Joseph

 

Joseph S. Lee, M.A.

PhD student and instructor of record (communication), University of Colorado Boulder

Certified NVDA Expert, 2025

Member, NVDA Advisory Group

Founder and initial event planner, NVDA Users and Developers Conference (NVDACon), 2014 to 2016