News

We are delighted to announce that the Global Braille Survey is now open!

As part of the Global Braille Literacy Campaign – More Braille: More Empowerment – the survey provides an important opportunity for people around the world to share their experiences and perspectives on braille literacy.

Led by the International Council for Education of People with Visual Impairment (ICEVI), the World Blind Union (WBU), and collaborating organisations and individuals, this global research initiative aims to strengthen our understanding of how braille is learned, taught, accessed and used – and of the factors that enable or create barriers to braille literacy.

Who can participate?

We warmly invite responses from:

• Adults aged 18 years and over who are blind, have low vision, or are deafblind;
• Parents and guardians of children of any age who are blind, have low vision, or are deafblind;
• Teachers and other professionals involved in braille education; and
• Braille transcribers.

Share your experience – Take the Global Braille Survey:

tiny.cc/braillesurvey

When you follow the above link, you will first be invited to select your preferred language, then review the informed consent information, and then complete a short set of questions to determine which survey or surveys are relevant to you.

If you are eligible for more than one survey – for example, if you are both an adult braille user and a braille transcriber – you are welcome to contribute from each perspective. Simply complete one survey and then return to the link when you are ready to complete another.

The survey is available in multiple languages

We are delighted that the Global Braille Survey is already available in a growing range of languages, helping to make it possible for more people around the world to participate.

The survey is currently available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Russian, Slovak, and Spanish.

Italian and Portuguese translations are awaiting verification, and we hope to make these languages available in the near future.

We also warmly welcome offers to assist with translations into additional languages so that the survey can reach an even wider range of countries, communities and language groups. If you have any questions about the survey, or would like to offer assistance with an additional language translation, please contact [email protected].

Why does your participation matter?

Every response adds to our global understanding of braille literacy. The findings will help build a stronger evidence base to inform advocacy, policy, research, resources and practice, and to support efforts to strengthen access to braille literacy around the world.

Please help us spread the word

We want to hear from people across countries, regions, languages and communities.

Please share the Global Braille Survey widely through your organisations, professional and community networks, and directly with braille users, families, educators, professionals and transcribers who may wish to participate.

By sharing the survey widely – including with communities using the languages in which the survey is now available – you can help us hear from as broad and diverse a range of participants as possible.

Every experience matters. Every perspective adds to the evidence. Every voice can help strengthen the future of braille literacy.

Thank you for being part of this important global effort.

We are delighted to share an encouraging update on the survey, which is a major initiative of the Global Braille Literacy Campaign – More Braille: More Empowerment.

More than 1000 surveys have now been completed!

This is a wonderful early response. We extend our sincere thanks to everyone who has already participated in the survey and to those who have helped promote it through their organisations, networks and braille communities.

A detailed snapshot taken on 25 August, when 637 surveys had been completed, demonstrates the growing global reach of the initiative:

• Respondents represented 49 countries and territories.
• Surveys had been completed in nine languages: English, Spanish, Slovak, German, Russian, French, Hungarian, Simplified Chinese and Hindi.
• 442 responses (69.4%) were from adults who are blind, have low vision, or are deafblind.
• 107 responses (16.8%) were from teachers and educational professionals.
• 74 responses (11.6%) were from braille transcribers.
• 14 responses (2.2%) were from parents and caregivers.

While we are greatly encouraged by this response, we want to hear from many more people, across many more countries and communities. We particularly welcome your help in reaching braille users, families, educators, professionals and transcribers whose experiences and perspectives may not yet be represented.

Who can participate?

The Global Braille Survey welcomes responses from:

• Adults aged 18 and over who are blind, have low vision, or are deafblind;
• Parents and guardians of children of any age who are blind, have low vision, or are deafblind;
• Teachers and other professionals involved in braille education, including retired professionals who have taught braille; and
• Braille transcribers.

Take the Global Braille Survey

https://tiny.cc/braillesurvey

The survey is currently available in Arabic, Czech, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Nepali Unicode, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak and Spanish.

For people who have difficulty accessing or completing the online survey because of poor internet connectivity, alternative arrangements are available. Please contact [email protected] or [email protected].

Watch and share the Global Braille Survey launch webinar

The recording of our August 2026 webinar introducing the survey and explaining its purpose is available on YouTube:

You can also share our Instagram post promoting the survey:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DckyMFMNuCa/?igsi=MWNoMmZ6dzdzb2s1dw==

We would greatly appreciate your continued support in sharing the survey and webinar recording through your organisations, professional networks and braille communities.

Every response helps us build a stronger global evidence base about how braille is learned, taught, accessed and used, as well as the factors that enable braille literacy or create barriers to it. The findings will help inform future advocacy, policy, research, resources and practice.

Every experience matters. Every perspective adds to the evidence. Every voice can help strengthen the future of braille literacy.

Thank you for helping us build a truly global picture of braille literacy.

NV Access is pleased to announce that version 2026.2 of NVDA, the free screen reader for Microsoft Windows, is now available for download. We encourage all users to upgrade to this version.

The braille display can now automatically scroll and DotPad devices support multi-button combinations. The default gesture to toggle automatic scroll is NVDA+alt+k.

Liblouis has been updated with new Italian and Estonian braille tables.

Download NVDA 2026.2

SHA256 sum: f3f8d29974a88d687b3c4809be192219ec579c5bdabcda5aaf53635288bca824

What’s new in NVDA 2026.2

The liblouis developer team is proud to announce the liblouis release 3.39.0.

Of particular note in this release is the introduction of improved Māori braille tables, together with dedicated UEB tables for New Zealand which incorporate the Māori macron.

Read the release notes

SharpLouis, my LibLouis .NET wrapper, is updated to version 3.0.0.

Main changes:

• Updated to LibLouis 3.39.0.
• Now the Braille translation table metadata is fully handled. for example, some tables have several languages, like Israeli Braille table has Hebrew, Arabic and English, and now FindByLanguage() will return those. Also, missing fields like region, grade, system, version, unicode-range, variant are handled by the wrapper.

NuGet: https://www.nuget.org/packages/AccessMind.SharpLouis

GitHub: https://github.com/accessmind/sharp-louis

Do you like my work? Please donate. https://oire.org/donate/

The UEB macron is two cells. In New Zealand the macron symbol appears almost exclusively in te reo Māori. When Duxbury worked with us to produce a New Zealand Duxbury template, they agreed to use the single cell macron of dots 456. That was the macron introduced in the mid 1960s. The Māori macron was added to the Duxbury Braille Translator in about 2008.

Some of us with electronic Braille displays have been agitating for some time to get the single cell macron into our screen readers, in particular Jaws and NVDA. At its meeting in June 2026 The Braille Authority of New Zealand Aotearoa Trust agreed with and endorsed this effort.

The Braille translator in Jaws and NVDA is Liblouis. Liblouis is one of the Braille translators available in Apple’s iOS.

James Bowden at the RNIB has been updating and correcting the UEB tables for English over several years. He guided Clive Lansink about the creation of Liblouis tables.

Clive has written the New Zealand tables for Liblouis with the one cell macron. The tables are now in the most recent release of Liblouis 3.39.0.

So when will screen reader users be able to choose the new tables? Creators of each of the screen readers have to add new tables manually. I have seen the Liblouis announcement about the latest update. I had absolutely no idea how many changes there are because of so very many languages besides English and te reo Māori. Even so, I have hope we will see the single cell macron in NVDA by this Christmas. I have no idea about Jaws or iOS. If The Braille Authority of New Zealand Aotearoa Trust needs to write to screen reader manufacturers, I am sure we will do so.

Thank you so much, Clive, for getting the ball rolling.

For anyone who is interested in trying out what the next version of NVDA has to offer before it is officially released, NV Access welcomes you to download the beta and provide feedback using their issue reporting process.

By installing the beta you will be opting into NVDA’s beta channel, and will only receive update notifications for beta and release candidate (RC) builds.

The beta/RC channel will always keep you up to date with the latest NVDA version.

The last RC in a release cycle is identical to the final stable release.

To return to the stable release channel, upgrade manually to the latest stable build.

Read the full announcement on the NV Access website

The NVDA Satisfaction Survey 2026 is now open: https://www.nvaccess.org/survey2026

We are always interested in understanding the satisfaction of our NVDA users. We want to understand clearly what is important to you and also identify what we can do more effectively.  This survey is anonymous, and we encourage you to add comments on the survey (but please add your email address if you’d like us to contact you about your feedback).

Last year we had a few questions around “Is your use of NVDA primarily for accessibility testing?” – if you use NVDA to get around the PC, even if you ALSO use it for accessibility testing, you can probably answer “no” to this.  If you are a sighted tester, or primarily use another screen reader and only start NVDA for testing…. then say “yes”.

We’re interested in hearing from as many people as possible, so please feel free to pass this on to others.

We are pleased to introduce OR-bot, Orbit Research’s new AI-powered technical support chatbot!

OR-bot provides immediate technical guidance for Orbit products, with no registration or login required. It can help you find product-specific technical information, troubleshoot problems, and get answers to commonly asked technical questions.

Try OR-bot here.

Simply select your Orbit product from the menu and type your question. OR-bot has been designed for screen-reader and keyboard accessibility. It can also respond in multiple languages, although response quality may vary by language.

OR-bot is being introduced as an early release and is still being improved. We invite you to try it with technical questions about the Orbit products you use and share your experience through the Feedback button inside the chatbot. Your feedback will play an important role in helping us make OR-bot better.

OR-bot may occasionally misunderstand a question or provide an incomplete or inaccurate response. If this happens, please try rephrasing your question. OR-bot is an additional support option and does not replace the Orbit Support Team. If you still need technical assistance, please contact us at [email protected].

Please note that conversations may be stored and reviewed to help us improve OR-bot. No personal information is collected, and conversations are not linked to individual users. Please do not include personal or sensitive information in your questions.

We look forward to hearing about your experience with OR-bot.

BrailliantConnect is out — free, open source, and finished. Plug a Brailliant in and it appears in the Finder. Unplug it and it goes away. No macFUSE, no kernel extension, nothing to start by hand.

I wrote it because I needed it. I use a BI 40X with a screen reader every day, and getting a file onto it from a Mac had stopped being possible in any way I was willing to live with.

What it does

• The display appears as ~/Brailliant in your home folder.
• One folder per storage — the display’s own memory, and a USB stick plugged into the display when there is one. Both at once: the stick is no longer invisible.
• Read and write. Copy files in and out with the Finder, or with anything else that uses the file system.
• A menu bar item says whether the display is there, and tells you when a copy is still running.

Installing

Unpack, drag into Applications, open it once. That is the whole procedure. It is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens with no Gatekeeper warning. macOS 11 or later, Intel and Apple Silicon.

One setting, on the display

File transfer (MTP) has to be on. It has been on by default since version 2.5 of the display’s software, so it probably already is. Otherwise: Options, User settings, MTP.

Nothing is switched off by this. Your display publishes its braille interfaces and the file-transfer one at the same time, and stays usable as a braille terminal while files are copying.

What it does not do

• The Finder returns before a copy is finished. Three gigabytes come back instantly and keep going for about seven minutes. The menu bar says so while it lasts, and notifies you when it lands — do not unplug in between.
• Changes made on the display itself go unnoticed until the folder is read again. MTP announces nothing.
• One connection at a time, which only matters if you also use the command-line tool that ships inside the app.

Only one model has been tested

I have a BI 40X, and that is what this was built on. Nothing in the code is tied to a model, but nothing proves the others work either. If you have a BI 20X, a BI 40, or anything else in the family, running brailliant doctor and pasting the output here would settle it — that is the one thing I cannot do alone.

More Info and Download

View the forum post on AppleVis