The company is thus dedicated to the ideal that accessibility and equitable access is a right and should not come as an extra cost to a person who is Blind or Vision Impaired. The purpose of NV Access is to lower the economic and social barriers associated with accessing Information Technology for people who are Blind or Vision Impaired. As we are a non-profit organisation, our work is funded primarily through grants and donations. We do this by employing developers, providing technical resources such as internet hosting and development tools, and facilitating attendance at conferences and events. NV Access develops and supports free and open source software that facilitates access to technology for blind and vision impaired people. NV Access was established in early 2007 as a result of the increasing support needs of the NVDA project. This enables translators and developers around the world to continually contribute to its expansion and improvement. NVDA is open source software, which means the code is accessible to anyone. NVDA has been translated by volunteers into more than 55 languages, and been used by people in more than 175 countries. Before too long they were able to work full-time on the project thanks to a series of corporate grants and individual donations. Together these two fully blind men founded the not-for-profit organisation NV Access to support the development of the NVDA screen reader. He invited James, who had recently completed his IT degree, to develop the software with him. In April 2006 Michael began to develop a free screen reader called NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access) for use with computers running on Windows. This is a critical problem, because without computers, access to education and employment is severely limited, not to mention everyday functions such as online banking, shopping and news. In the past this has left computers inaccessible to millions of blind people around the world. But in many cases screen reading software costs more than the computer itself. Several years later they decided to join forces to help improve the accessibility of computers for blind and vision impaired people.įor blind people to use a computer, they need a screen reader which reads the text on the screen in a synthetic voice or with a braille display. Michael Curran and James Teh met as children on a music camp for the blind, where they realised they shared a strong interest in computers.
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