The below list of features is a subset of the full list of new features for NVDA. I am simplifying and explaining the feature set in an attempt to help nontechnical people appreciate what’s new for NVDA. This list was retrieved from NvAccess and edited here.

What’s New in NVDA2022.1

This release includes major improvements to UIA support with MS Office. For Microsoft Office 16.0.15000 and higher on Windows 11, NVDA will use UI Automation to access Microsoft Word documents by default. This provides a significant performance improvement over the old Object model access.

There are improvements to braille display drivers including Seika Notetaker, Papenmeier and HID Braille. There are also various Windows 11 bug fixes, for apps such as Calculator, Console, Terminal, Mail and Emoji Panel. eSpeak-NG and LibLouis have been updated, adding new Japanese, German and Catalan tables.

Note:

• This release breaks compatibility with existing add-ons.

New Features

• Support for reporting notes in MS Excel with UI Automation enabled on Windows 11
• In recent builds of Microsoft Word via UI Automation on Windows 11, the existence of bookmarks, draft comments and resolved comments are now reported in both speech and braille
• The new –lang command line parameter allows overriding the configured NVDA language
• NVDA now warns about command line parameters which are unknown and not used by any add-ons
• In Microsoft Word accessed via UI Automation, NVDA will now make use of mathPlayer to read and navigate Office math equations
  • For this to work, you must be running Microsoft Word 365/2016 build 14326 or later.
  • MathType equations must also be manually converted to Office Math by selecting each, opening the context menu, choosing Equation options, Convert to Office Math.
• Seika Notetaker can now be auto-detected when connected via USB and Bluetooth
  • This affects the following devices: MiniSeika , V6, and V6Pro
  • Manually selecting the bluetooth COM port is also now supported.
• Added a command to toggle the braille viewer; there is no default associated gesture
• Added commands for toggling multiple modifiers simultaneously with a Braille display
• The Speech Dictionary dialog now features a “Remove all” button to help clear a whole dictionary
• Added support for Windows 11 Calculator
• In Microsoft Word with UI Automation enabled on Windows 11, line numbers and section numbers can now be reported
• For Microsoft Office 16.0.15000 and higher on Windows 11, NVDA will use UI Automation to access Microsoft Word documents by default, providing a significant performance improvement over the old Object model access
  • This includes documents in Microsoft Word itself, and also the message reader and composer in Microsoft Outlook.

Changes

• Espeak-ng has been updated to 1.51-dev commit 7e5457f91e10
• Updated liblouis braille translator to 3.21.0
  • Added new braille table: Japanese  literary braille.
  • Added new German 6 dot computer braille table.
  • Added Catalan grade 1 braille table
• NVDA will report selection and merged cells in LibreOffice Calc 7.3 and above
• Updated Unicode Common Locale Data Repository  to 40.0
• NVDA+Numpad Delete reports the location of the caret or focused object by default
• NVDA+Shift+Numpad Delete reports the location of the review cursor
• Added default bindings for toggling modifier keys to Freedom Scientific displays
• “Baseline” is no longer reported via the report text formatting command
• Activate long description no longer has a default gesture assigned
• Report details summary now has a default gesture
• NVDA needs to be restarted after installing MathPlayer

Bug Fixes

• Clipboard manager pane should no longer incorrectly steal focus when opening some Office programs
• On a system where the user has chosen to swap the primary mouse button from the left to the right, NVDA will no longer accidentally bring up a context menu instead of activating an item, in applications such as web browsers
• When moving the review cursor past the end of text controls, such as in Microsoft Word with UI Automation, “bottom” is correctly reported in more situations
• NVDA can report the application name and version for binaries placed in system32 when running under 64-bit version of Windows
• Improved consistency of output reading in terminal programs
  • Note that in some situations, when inserting or deleting characters in the middle of a line, the characters after the caret may again be read out.
• MS word with UIA: heading quick nav in browse mode no longer gets stuck on the final heading of a document, nor is this heading shown twice in the NVDA elements list
• In Windows 8 and later, the File Explorer status bar can now be retrieved using the standard gesture NVDA+end  / NVDA+shift+end
• Incoming messages in the chat of Skype for Business are reported again
• NVDA can again duck audio when using the SAPI5 synthesizer on Windows 11
• In Windows 10 Calculator, NVDA will announce labels for history and memory list items
• Gestures such as scrolling and routing again work with HID Braille devices
• Windows 11 Mail: After switching focus between apps, while reading a long email, NVDA no longer gets stuck on a line of the email
• HID braille: chorded gestures  can be successfully performed from the Braille display
• Fixed an issue where multiple settings dialogs could be opened at the same time
• Fixed a problem where some Focus Blue Braille displays would stop working after waking the computer from sleep
• “Baseline” is no longer spuriously reported when the “report superscript and subscript” option is active
• In Windows 11, NVDA will no longer prevent navigation in emoji panel when selecting emojis
• Prevents a bug causing double-reporting when using Windows Console and Terminal
• Fixed several cases where list items could not be reported in 64 bit applications, such as REAPER
• In the Microsoft Edge downloads manager, NVDA will now automatically switch to focus mode once the list item with the most recent download gains focus
• NVDA no longer causes 64-bit versions of Notepad++ 8.3 and above to crash
• Adobe Reader no longer crashes on startup if Adobe Reader’s protected mode is enabled
• Fixed a bug where selecting the Papenmeier Braille Display Driver caused NVDA to crash
• In Microsoft word with UIA: page number and other formatting is no longer inappropriately announced when moving from a blank table cell to a cell with content, or from the end of the document into existing content
• NVDA will no longer fail to report the page title and start automatically reading, when a page loads in Google chrome 100
• NVDA no longer crashes when resetting the NVDA configuration to factory defaults while speak command keys is on

Start Your Update

If you’re running NVDA while reading this, perform the following steps to update it right now!

1. Press NVDA+N.
2. Press the letter H, or arrow down to Help.
3. Press the letter C, or arrow down to Check for update…

Enjoy your new NVDA!

Qapla!