Dial
An NVDA add-on that turns a volume dial into a launcher.
Turn the dial to move through your own categories of websites, folders, files, applications, internet radio stations, workspaces, text snippets, world clocks and NVDA's own commands, and press to launch what you landed on.
No dial? Dial mode gives you the whole add-on from the arrow keys.
What is in it:
- Internet radio, played inside NVDA, so there is no browser window and nothing steals your focus. Over 250 stations from 11 countries are built in, you can paste your own stream address, and there is a sleep timer.
- Speech that wins over the music. A station drops in volume while Dial talks and comes back when it has finished, instead of talking over itself.
- A sound device of its own for the radio, so a station plays through your speakers while NVDA keeps speaking in your headphones, or the other way round. Your Windows sound settings are not touched.
- Clipboard history on its own key, with copies from password managers left out. Keep it until NVDA restarts, or keep it afterwards in an encrypted file that only your Windows account on this computer can read.
- Most used, a category that keeps what you reach for most at the front.
- Import and export, so a set-up moves between machines.
Requirements
What you need for Dial to run at all.
- NVDA 2021.1 or later.
- Windows.
- A volume dial, or media keys, or neither. Anything that sends volume up, volume down, and either mute or play/pause will do, and a dial that only turns is fine. If you have none of those, Dial mode runs the whole add-on from the arrow keys instead.
Tested on
What it has actually been run on, which is a different question from what it needs.
- NVDA 2026 . 1 . 1
- Windows 11.
- Keychron V5 Max and Keychron V6 Max keyboards, using the knob as the dial.
Audio guide
Four recordings, about thirty five minutes altogether. Each player names its own part, so the play button tells you which one you are on.
User guide
The same guide that ships inside the add-on, where it is a category you can reach from the dial itself.
- All topics, the contents page
- Getting started, the five-minute tour
- Dial mode, using Dial when you have no dial
- Categories and items, building your launcher
- Workspaces, opening several things with one press
- Internet radio, playing a station straight from the dial
- Clipboard history and snippets, getting text back and keeping text to hand
- Most Used, the category that fills itself
- Import and export, backing up and moving your set-up
- How you control Dial, the dial, the keyboard, or both
- Troubleshooting, fixes for common problems
Download
dial-V100.nvda-addon, 9.5 MB.
What it installs
Dial is a 9.5 megabyte download, and about 21 megabytes once installed. Almost all of that is libVLC, the engine behind VLC media player.
It is there so internet radio plays inside NVDA. Nothing opens, nothing takes your focus, and it does not matter what is or is not installed on your computer. Handing stations to a browser or to whatever media player you happen to have would be smaller, and it would put a window in front of you every time you turned onto a station.
- No account and no sign-in. Nothing is sent anywhere. The add-on itself makes no connection of its own: the only network use is playing the station you chose, and checking a network folder is answering before it opens it, so a sleeping drive cannot leave you waiting with nothing said.
- It does not change Windows settings on its own. One Windows setting can be changed from Dial, the shortcut that starts Sticky Keys when you tap Shift five times, and only by pressing a button that asks you first and says what it will do. Nothing happens on install or at startup. That setting belongs to Windows accessibility and somebody else signing in to your account may rely on it, so it is never touched without being asked for.
- Your categories live in NVDA's own configuration, not in the add-on folder, so updating or reinstalling never touches them.
- Clipboard history stays on your machine. Kept in memory unless you ask for it to be saved, and if you do, Windows encrypts the file so that only your account on this computer can read it. Copies from password managers are skipped whichever setting you choose.
Source code
Dial is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 2.
Internet radio plays through libVLC, part of VLC media player, by the VideoLAN project, used unmodified and also under the GPL version 2 or later.
Dial on GitHub, where the source, the releases and the issue tracker are.