Virtual Audio Cable NVDA Add-on
Doug Lee
Last Revised March, 2024

This is the Virtual Audio Cable (VAC) NVDA add-on. This add-on improves NVDA's presentation of the Control Panel and the two audiorepeater apps. Current features:

Field naming in all three VAC applications via the help balloons associated with each field. This approach works in VAC 4.60 and later.
Silencing of progress bars, as progress bars are used in VAC as meters.

Note that this add-on no longer modifies the tab order in the two audio repeater applications as did older add-on versions, because this caused more problems than it solved in VAC 4.60 and later. An original feature of restoring focus after the user pressed Start in an audio repeater application is also removed, as it also caused more problems than it solved.

Usage instructions:

If you are running VAC version 4.60 or later, download and install the current add-on.
If you are running a VAC version older than 4.60, such as 4.14 or 4.15, download and install the older add-on instead. The older add-on tries to name fields and adjust tab order in older VAC versions that do not include help balloons for fields. Note that the older add-on version will not support NVDA 2022.1 and later.

Known Issues

This add-on causes help balloons for each field to speak as the field gains focus. However, this occurs after, rather than before, the announcement of the field type and value as applicable. This is due to the delay between focus change to new field and appearance of the help balloon associated with the field.

Revision History

This is the revision history of this add-on, most recent entry first.

Version 2024.1.1, March 27, 2024

This revision adds support for NVDA 2024.1.

Version 2023.1.1, February 14, 2023

This revision adds support for NVDA 2023.1. It also removes the attempt to fix focus issues after the pressing of Start on an audio repeater, as this feature has not worked reliably for some time.

Version 2022.1.1, May 23, 2021

This revision adds support for NVDA 2022.1.

Version 2021.1.1, May 30, 2021

This revision adds support for NVDA 2021.1 as can best be established from the beta available at the time of add-on release.

Version 2020.1.2, September 12, 2020

This revision fixes the announcement of list items in the VAC Control Panel cable list.

Version 2020.1.1, July 26, 2020

This add-on's name, as displayed in the NVDA Add-on Manager, is changed from "Enhancements for Virtual Audio Cable (VAC) applications" to "Virtual Audio Cable (VAC)" so that it will sort more intuitively among add-on titles in the add-on list.
This add-on no longer alters tab order in the two audio repeater applications, because in VAC versions 4.60 and later, this caused more problems than it solved.
Fields are now named via automatic announcement of the help balloon text for each field as the field receives focus, rather than by hard-coded names per field in the add-on itself.
This document is included in the add-on and is available through the "Add-on Help" button in the NVDA Add-on Manager.

Version 2020.1.0, January 13, 2020

This is the first revision that worked in NVDA 2019.3.x.

Previous revisions

There is no specific recorded history of which add-on revisions before the end of 2018 were released for public use. A rough sketch of add-on history follows, most recent entry first:

March 11, 2018: GNU 2 license added to add-on.
June 11, 2015: Localization calls added to code.
August 24, 2014: Progress bars are silenced, per suggestion from Chad Blanco.
June 22, 2014: First version supporting tab management, field naming, and double speech evasion (version 0.97).

Virtual Audio Cable NVDA Add-on Doug Lee Last Revised March, 2024