What's New in NVDA 2018.4

Highlights of this release include performance improvements in recent Mozilla Firefox versions, announcement of emojis with all synthesizers, reporting of replied/forwarded status in Outlook, reporting the distance of the cursor to the edge of a Microsoft Word page, and many bug fixes.

New Features

• New braille tables: Chinese (China, Mandarin) grade 1 and grade 2.
• Replied / Forwarded status is now reported on mail items in the Microsoft Outlook message list.
• NVDA is now able to read descriptions for emoji as well as other characters that are part of the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository.
• In Microsoft Word, the cursor's distance from the top and left edges of the page can be reported by pressing NVDA+numpadDelete.
• In Google Sheets with braille mode enabled, NVDA no longer announces 'selected' on every cell when moving focus between cells.
• Added support for Foxit Reader and Foxit Phantom PDF.
• Added support for the DBeaver database tool.

Changes

• "Report help balloons" in the Object Presentations dialog has been renamed to "Report notifications" to include reporting of toast notifications in Windows 8 and later.
• In NVDA's keyboard settings, the checkboxes to enable or disable NVDA modifier keys are now displayed in a list rather than as separate checkboxes.
• NVDA will no longer present redundant information when reading clock system tray on some versions of Windows.
• Updated liblouis braille translator to version 3.7.0.
• Updated eSpeak-NG to commit 919f3240cbb.

Bug Fixes

• In Outlook 2016/365, the category and flag status are reported for messages.
• When NVDA is set to languages such as Kirgyz, Mongolian or Macedonian, it no longer shows a dialog on start-up warning that the language is not supported by the Operating System.
• Moving the mouse to the navigator object will now much more accurately move the mouse to the browse mode position in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Acrobat Reader DC.
• Interacting with combo boxes on the web in Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer has been improved.
• If running on the Japanese version of Windows XP or Vista, NVDA now displays OS version requirements message as expected.
• Performance improvements when navigating large pages with lots of dynamic changes in Mozilla Firefox.
• Braille no longer shows font attributes if they have been disabled in Document Formatting settings.
• NVDA no longer fails to track focus in File Explorer and other applications using UI Automation when another app is busy (such as batch processing audio).
• In ARIA menus on the web, the Escape key will now be passed through to the menu and no longer turn off focus mode unconditionally.
• In the new Gmail web interface, when using quick navigation inside messages while reading them, the entire body of the message is no longer reported after the element to which you just navigated.
• After updating NVDA, Browsers such as Firefox and google Chrome should no longer crash, and browse mode should continue to correctly reflect updates to any currently loaded documents.
• NVDA no longer reports clickable multiple times in a row when navigating clickable content in Browse Mode.
• Gestures performed on baum Vario 40 braille displays will no longer fail to execute.
• In Google Slides with Mozilla Firefox, NVDA no longer reports selected text on every control with focus.