Introduction
The NVDA screen reader is a great tool for thoroughly auditing the accessibility of digital content, whether it's a website, publication, or app. To make the most of it and enhance your experience, you may want to adjust a few settings beyond the default installation.
While this guide is intended for new or casual users, you may find these adjustments useful even if you're more experienced. By fine-tuning a few key settings, you can streamline accessibility testing and make the reader work even more efficiently for your needs.
About NVDA
Non-Visual Desktop Access (NVDA) is a free, open-source screen reader for Windows, with support for popular applications like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Word, and Excel. A 2023 WebAIM survey shows that about 65% of respondents use NVDA, reflecting its growing popularity in recent years.
NVDA can be run as a portable application, requiring no administrative rights, or installed as a service to operate at the login screen and interact with elevated prompts.
Voice synthesizers
I cover voice synthesizers more in-depth in my article on configuring NVDA for multilingual testing, but the short version is that the synthesizer controls speech output—the voice you hear. NVDA includes several options, though Microsoft OneCore Voices is the most human-sounding and likely your best choice initially. If you want to switch, you can do so in the Speech preferences menu.
- NVDA menu
- Preferences
- Speech
Speech viewer
For casual users, the speech viewer is an invaluable tool that's hard to overlook. It provides a real-time text display of NVDA's spoken output, allowing you to easily review what's being read aloud. This is especially useful for debugging as you can quickly copy text directly from the viewer.
- NVDA menu
- Tools
- Speech viewer
Mouse tracking
You may have noticed NVDA reading everything the mouse cursor hovers over. In my experience, this can quickly become overwhelming, so it's often better to disable it, focusing on keyboard interactions while using the mouse independently.
To toggle mouse tracking, press NVDA + M, or go through NVDA's Mouse settings panel.
- NVDA menu
- Settings
- Mouse
- Enable mouse tracking
NVDA modifier key
The NVDA modifier key is used for shortcuts and is mapped to Insert by default. If you're using a laptop or a condensed keyboard where that isn't available, the NVDA key can be mapped to Caps Lock in the Keyboard settings.
- NVDA menu
- Preferences
- Settings
- Keyboard
Keyboard shortcuts
The following is a curated list of shortcuts I typically use. While they should cover the basics, NV Access have a complete set of NVDA keyboard shortcuts available.
| Type | Shortcut | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Reading | Shift | Pause/resume speech |
| NVDA + ↓ | Read continuously from current position | |
| NVDA + ↑ | Read current line | |
| Navigation | ↑ / ↓ | Previous/next item |
| Tab / Shift + Tab | Next/previous interactive element | |
| D / Shift + D | Next/previous landmark | |
| H / Shift + H | Next/previous heading | |
| Interaction | Enter | Activate an element or press a button |
| Space | Activate menus or press a button | |
| Escape | Close menus, pop-ups, and leave input mode | |
| Speech | NVDA + S | Toggle speech mode |
| NVDA + Ctrl + Up | Increase speech rate | |
| NVDA + Ctrl + Down | Decrease speech rate |