NVDA 2026.2 Release Candidate Adds Built-In Magnifier and Expanded Touch Support

NV Access, the nonprofit behind the free open-source NVDA screen reader for Windows, announced on August 24, 2026 that the NVDA 2026.2 Release Candidate (RC) is available for download and testing. The organization said that unless any critical bugs are found, the RC will be identical to the final 2026.2 stable release.

The release candidate highlights include a new built-in Magnifier feature that provides zoom and color filtering options to assist users with visual impairments. The Magnifier currently supports fullscreen mode only, with docked modes planned for a future release. Touch support has also been significantly expanded, adding new pinch gestures and touch-based browse mode navigation that lets users move between links, headings, form fields and other elements with touch flicks.

Speech capabilities in NVDA 2026.2 include support for custom speech dictionaries provided by add-ons, new dictionary entry types for more granular control, and a new voice setting for OneCore voices that controls pauses after punctuation. A new command, bound by default to NVDA+x, repeats the last spoken information and can display it in a browsable message.

Braille users gain automatic scrolling of the braille display, while DotPad devices now support multi-button combinations. The Liblouis braille translation library has been updated with new Italian and Estonian braille tables, and resetting NVDA to factory defaults now offers an Undo button to restore the previous configuration.

Installing the RC opts users into NVDA's beta/RC channel, which delivers update notifications for test builds; users can return to the stable channel by upgrading manually to the latest stable build. The RC follows a beta testing cycle that included beta 9, beta 10 and beta 11 releases. NV Access is encouraging users to download and test the RC and report any issues on the project's GitHub repository before the final release.