(Sorry I was a bit slow posting here - nothing new for those who have seen the beta announcement elsewhere this week - although one thing I'll try differently here and would appreciate feedback on - instead of making a completely new post for every subsequent beta - I'll make the announcements replies to this post. Please do let me know what you think of that or how you find it)
Beta1 of NVDA 2024.4 is now available for download and testing. For anyone who is interested in trying out what the next version of NVDA has to offer before it is officially released, we welcome you to download the beta and provide feedback using our issue reporting process.
Read the full details and download from: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-4beta1/
Highlights This release includes a number of improvements in Microsoft Office, braille, and document formatting.
In Word or Excel, it is now possible to double-press the comment gesture to read the comment or note in a browsable dialog. You can now use the review cursor selection command to select text in PowerPoint. NVDA also no longer brailles garbage characters when showing row or column header text in tables in Word when using the object model.
NVDA can now be configured to report font attributes in speech and braille separately.
A new setting has been added to configure the timeout to perform a multiple press gesture, such as the report time/date command.
You can now configure how NVDA shows text formatting in braille, and set NVDA to show the start of paragraphs in braille. NVDA can now speak the character at the cursor when performing a braille cursor routing action. Cursor routing reliability has been improved, and support for routing keys in PowerPoint has been added. All lines of cells will now be used when using a multi-line braille display via HID braille. NVDA is no longer unstable after restarting NVDA during an automatic Braille Bluetooth scan.
eSpeak NG has been updated, adding support for the Faroese and Xextan languages.
There have also been a number of fixes, including to mouse tracking in Firefox, and the on-demand speech mode.