Introduction
For the past month I’ve been work on an accessibility project. There are three major screen readers
Given that JAWS is pretty pricey and has a steep learning curve I have mostly been focussing ongetting everything running well on NVDA and VoiceOver and getting support from other members of theteam to check JAWS.
For the past 8 years I have been working on a Mac. Whilst there is VoiceOver for Mac (which is notthe same as VoiceOver on iOS) NVDA is not available and only runs on Windows. To get this runningrequired a bit of work that I couldn’t find documented anywhere else. So here it is for you andfuture me.
Instructions
- The first thing is to get a copy of Windows so that we can run in VirtualBox locally. LuckilyMicrosoft provide Window 10 imagesfor testing browsers on Windows. They expire after 3 months but saves £150.
- Once you have Windows then you also need VirtualBox. If you havehomebrew you can install it with
brew cask install virtualbox
. - Now you need to load and boot the virtual machine.
- Download and install VirtualBox extension pack intothe VM.
- Stop the VM.
Alter the VM Settings and under the audio tab.
- Enable Audio
- Set the
Host Audio Driver
toCoreAudio
- Set the
Audio Controller
toIntel HD Audio
- Under extended features ensure that
Enable Audio Output
is checked- Boot the VM and the audio should be working now. You can prove it by visiting YouTube or somethingsimilar.
- Now, within the VM download NVDA
- Install NVDA
Now you can use a browser and see how it is read by NVDA.
Optional extra - Getting NVDA to read multiple languages correctly
- With NVDA running you can right click on it running in the task bar and select
Preference
>Settings
- Under the
Speech
section you need to set theSynthesizer
toeSpeak NG
. - Now it should respect the element and html language attribute to determine how to read the text.
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