In-Process 26th February 2025Welcome to another In-Process, whether you are reading on the web, or via email.This time around we cover:NVDA 2025.1Planning for CSUNWhat’s on the webReading paragraphs in BrailleNVDA 2025.1We know everyone loves a new version of NVDA, so we wanted to share a quick note on the status of NVDA 2025.1. We have many big and exciting things coming in NVDA 2025.1. One of which is the long-anticipated inclusion of NVDA Remote into NVDA itself. We will have more to say on that soon, but for now, rest assured that there has been a lot of work going into it. We know add-on authors are waiting for the beta period to test breaking changes, and our we will have a beta is coming soon. We will also ensure that there is plenty of time to get add-ons updated before the final NVDA 2025.1 comes out. In the meantime, a reminder to add-on developers to be sure to subscribe to the API changes list if you aren’t already.Planning for CSUNThis year’s CSUN AT conference is fast approaching, and we are looking forward to it! NV Access will be in Anaheim checking out what is new, meeting with people, and presenting. Come and find out what is new with NVDA, and what is coming up on Tuesday 11th March, 1:20pm in Grand GH. And over the rest of the week, do say hi if you encounter us in the hall!The California State University, Northridge organise the CSUN Assistive Technology conference. As the largest conference of its kind, CSUN showcases all kinds of technology. This year’s conference runs from March 10 – 14 at the Anaheim Marriott, California, USA.This year, the conference is using the CVENT app to help you manage your attendance. You can use the app to plan which sessions you would like to attend. We hope to see you there!What’s on the webThis week we were very surprised to see a headline “Revolutionizing Accessibility: NVDA’s Leap into AI”. I won’t link to the article, as from what we can tell, it is purely a click-bait site. That is, a site designed to get you to click on things and generate ad revenue, and this one all AI generated.Despite the bold claims in the article, and perhaps to the disappointment of some, NVDA is not about to suddenly pivot and start using all manner of AI tools for every conceivable use-case. One huge advantage of how NVDA gets information currently is consistency. If you navigate around a program with NVDA, you know the experience will be exactly the same next time. We agree there are some tasks for which AI tools have a very useful place. Be My AI and Meta glasses are examples which have been hugely popular among vision impaired users. And, it’s worth noting that AI is nothing new for NVDA either. There are many add-ons available for NVDA which provide features such as AI-Powered image description. Quite a few of these add-ons have been available, and some for over five years. As mentioned in our roadmap recently, we are researching how best to incorporate AI. This may include features such as inbuilt image recognition, accessibility enhancement, or an AI powered chatbot.This is a timely reminder to double check any information you read online – even when it is shared by an honest and reputable source. No negative feelings to those who shared it, the content did exactly as LLM generated content is designed to do: it sounded reasonable at first read. A couple of general tips when navigating the web:Check official sources for information. If it is a big announcement about NVDA for instance, we will make a statement on our official social media channels, website, blog, and via email. The same is generally true for other companies.Some content these days is churned out by LLM generators such as Chat GPT and posted purely for reactions. If you are shocked or amazed by something, and share it to all your friends, then that gives exposure to the source. The article and all the advertisements on it get seen by more and more people. That helps pay them to generate even more of the same content (even if you ignore the ads).Before handing over personal details, payment information or downloading something, double check that the site is reputable. Find reviews, check with others, etc. If something has a time limit, such as having to be bought within the next five minutes, or sounds too good to be true…. It probably is.There are lots of websites with tips on staying safe online – of course ensure THEY are reputable. Here are a couple I got from government agencies, in the UK, from Canada, and an Australian one for kidsReading paragraphs in BrailleOne new feature in NVDA 2024.4 is the ability to read by paragraph in braille. In NVDA’s braille formatting settings is a “Read by paragraph” checkbox. If enabled, braille will be displayed by paragraphs instead of lines. Also, the next and previous line commands will move by paragraph accordingly. This means that you do not have to scroll the display at the end of each line even where more text would fit on the display. This may allow for more fluent reading of large amounts of text. It is disabled by default.If “Read by paragraph” is checked, the selected start marker will be displayed to indicate the start of a paragraph. This can be especially helpful in applications used to read large pieces of text, like structured documents or books. In such documents, knowing where paragraphs start may be useful to understand the structure of the content, or to set bookmarks or annotations based on paragraph position.The options include using two spaces as a subtle paragraph break, and the paragraph symbol, pilcrow (¶) (the same symbol shown for paragraphs in Word when Word’s show formatting symbols is enabled).So now, please indulge me as I go off on a linguistic tangent to explore the pilcrow!By around 200 A.D., written “paragraphs,” which could loosely be understood as changes in topic, speaker or stanza, were denoted by myriad symbols developed by scribes. There was little consistency in these between scribes. By the 12th century, “C”, for capitulum (“little head”) became more widely used to divide texts into capitula (also known as “chapters”). The symbol evolved and gained a vertical line (in keeping with the latest rubrication trends). With other, more elaborate embellishments, the symbol eventually became the modern pilcrow symbol.The word itself originally comes from the Greek paragraphos (para, “beside” and graphein, “to write”). This led to the Old French paragraph, which we know for the block of text. The word further evolved into pelagraphe and pelagreffe, then into the Middle English pylcrafte. Finally, this became “pilcrow” which is now used specifically for the paragraph symbol.Various paragraph mark symbols from Typography.comThat’s all for this time around. We’ll be back next week before we head off to CSUN. We anticipate having more information about 2025.1 Beta 1 then.