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Edit: This post is based on outdated information which is no longer relevant. I apologize for the confusion.
NVDA Remote was merged into NVDA for the upcoming 2025.1 release.
This sounds like something to be happy about, but read on.
Now every new feature and change has to go through NV Access to get approved, which is a lot more work than adding your feature to an addon.
Why not create a separate addon? As said in #17703, they plan to remove the ability for addons to run on secure screens in the future. If this happens, nothing like Remote can ever be created again without the blessing and cooperation of NV Access.
Instead of empowering developers and users by allowing them to choose which addons are usable on secure screens, NV Access plans on disabling them.
Merging this just gives NV Access more leverage to meeting this goal. Their reason might be something like now that Remote is merged, we don't need addons there anymore because the interaction time is so short.
You might say that NVDA is open source, so someone can just modify the features they don't like. That's true, but it has to be signed for UI Access to work correctly, so someone would have to pay quite a bit to fork it and do their own thing. You then also have the problem of a fragmented community between NVDA and the new one.
The advantage with Remote merged in is that the users will be able to use Remote without an extra download, but we're going to be stuck with whatever NV Access gives us. I guess we'll see what they turn it into.
@tspivey Wow, not even synthesizers? Or what if there actually are Braille display driver add-ons? The infra for those exists, even if I haven't yet encountered any in the wild. Also speech history. I'll probably just keep using tele NVDA if their integration of this doesn't break any such add-ons.
@tspivey Now, if they do end up making a corporate version of NVDA which comes with add-ons hard disabled, I wouldn't object. Security departments are worried about arbitrary code execution and it isn't entirely unfounded. I wouldn't take it for a malware target but it might allow you to break out of a sandbox. A useful signing mechanism would be nice to bring in synth drivers and app modules approved by higher ups.
@KyleBorah @x0 @tspivey We regularly liaise with corporate IT departments using NVDA and haven't encountered a company or IT department in at least 10 years worried about NVDA because it's open source. If you can provide concrete details to us of specific organisations with concerns (privately) we'd be grateful. In the meantime, please see this section of our corporate pages which links to multiple international company & government policies encouraging open source: https://www.nvaccess.org/corporate-government/#OpenSource
