I think an interactive NVDA tutorial for beginners would be a great project. NVDA is a powerful, open source, free screen reader that many blind people, such as myself, use every day. A screen reader is the primary program that most blind people use to access a computer; NVDA is the second most popular screen reader for Windows, and it is growing in popularity. The fact that NVDA's biggest competitor cost almost one thousand dollars is one of many reasons for NVDA's popularity, and it makes the program an especially attractive option for people who have recently lost their sight.

However, it can be very difficult for newly blind people to learn a program such as NVDA. This is why I believe an interactive tutorial for NVDA would be a very useful and powerful project for you to consider.

I'm pretty sure that it would be a reasonably manageable project; as I mentioned NVDA is open source, and people write extensions for it all of the time. Plus the founders are really cool and responsive, they might be able to give you feedback about the idea, and if you made something really cool, maybe they would add it to the official release version.

One possible idea I have for this kind of project would be an interactive tutorial similar to what Apple has for it's mac OS screen reader, VoiceOver. This tutorial walks you through all of the basic concepts and methods you need to use the program. If you want to check out this tutorial you can pull it up on any mac by either hitting command, f5, or triple tapping the finger print reader while holding down command, on touch bar macs.

For my wife's job she recommends technology for blind students; she is always pushing for NVDA, but teacher's always say that the competing program that cost one thousand dollars has better training materials, so they would rather have the state buy that option. A well done, user friendly, tutorial could be a major factor in allowing more people to go for NVDA, which would save the state, and individuals, countless amounts of money. Also, NVDA has become a life changer for thousands of people in third world countries, who would never be able to afford access to computers without this powerful screen reader.

Just an idea, thought I would throw it out there.

Some things worth looking into:

1. Machine learning that can analyze a GUI, pick out the buttons, and present them linearly to a screen reader. Many interfaces aren't accessible to screen readers, some logic that could intelligently parse onscreen elements would be welcome.
2. Consumer-quality laser rangefinder / sonar object detector. This is the kind of thing you can build with an arduino but something properly tested would be useful.
3. Going outside the box here, but an echolocation device that would send a sonar pulse into the nearby environment and return a sonification of that ping could potentially be useful. A few blind individuals have trained themselves to navigate with sound and have expressed an interest in this technology, and perhaps these soundscapes could open up this form of navigation to others.

I'll note that all of these might have commercial applications outside of accessibility. 2 and 3 would be useful in robotics, for example, and GUI detection could be used by developers in automatic testing of applications, to list just one use.

An app that helps developers/web admins test and experience their websites with a text to speech program would probably be most helpful. We have the technology to read the websites, but only if they are created properly.

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Hello.

impablomations- Homonymous Hemianopsia is refering to a comment that I made and then deleted after reading their comment as I thought it wasn't very useful. I didn't read the post fully and will do so in the future when it comes to blindness and VI posts. I have just found out that once you delete a comment, reddit does not delete the replies to your comment.

I mentioned the OrCam and how it was not useful for blind people. I still stick by that as a blind person would not be able to point at signs and use the button to take the picture. (If the blind person new where the sign was, they may be able to point at it, but i'm talking about when walking around a new city.) A VI person may be able to do so, depending on how much they can see.