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Edit: This post is based on outdated information which is no longer relevant.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 I wanted to mention @NVAccess on this so we can discuss this as I'm not in favor of completely disabling add-ons on secure screens at all and I will not update my NVDA if this happens. Apart from Remote, we need to think about people who prefer a certain speech synthesizer due to, for instance, hearing loss, or cases where the built-in synthesizers do not have very good language support for a given language (for instance, I heard that eSpeak has some foreign languages that are not good at all and there are some OneCore voices that also do not have high quality support for certain languages). Please consider these points before enforcing the inability to use add-ons on the secure screens. The correct approach is to either allow the add-on developer to indicate in the manifest whether the add-on is allowed to run on a secure screen, or to allow a user to individually select which add-ons to copy to the secure screen. The fact that the plan is to just completely disable all add-ons on the secure screen, instead of allowing users to selectively copy add-ons over to the secure screen, when users express that they want this, is not good and it is not in the user's best interest. I am hoping that this thread can start a dialogue about this so that this can be discussed further, as opposed to completely disabling add-ons on the secure screens without considering the possible ramifications.
@gocu54 @tspivey @NVAccess @BTyson I think we need to know the underlying reason behind this move. Have they been ghreatened with legal action? Are they hoping more IT departments will allow employees to use NVDA? NVDA has beenquite quiet as of late. If there's a problem, they at least deserve the opportunity to explain it to us without us immediately jumping down their throats.
@BTyson @tspivey @x0 @Bruce @gocu54 As of now, we've seen one unsubstantiated rumour panic a heap of people on here, from someone who should know better and have approached us with their concerns first. The NV Access team have discussed this today and confirmed there are no plans even through 2026.x for anything this disruptive. If you have seen an issue which seems to state this, PLEASE share it as I am curious as much as anything now.
@BTyson @tspivey @x0 @Bruce @gocu54 And we are grateful you did, as the OP didn't bother - In fact, the best place to question that issue comment, if not the issue, would have been an email to US directly, not a public comment to everyone EXCEPT us. We had since considered the impact and alternatives and changed thinking, and would have been happy to confirm that if anyone had asked... (And yes, I've since commented on the issue to confirm that as well)