Discord Messages Reader

An NVDA add-on that automatically announces incoming Discord chat messages as they arrive, without requiring you to navigate away from what you are doing.

How It Works

Discord is built on Chromium/Electron. NVDA's standard accessibility hooks become unreliable for the message list when focus is in the chat input field. This add-on bypasses that limitation by reading Discord's UI Automation (UIA) tree directly, polling every 500 milliseconds for new messages. When a new message appears, it is spoken immediately at the highest speech priority so it is never missed.

Requirements

• NVDA 2024.1 or later
• Discord (stable, PTB, or Canary builds)
• Windows 10 or later

Installation

1. Download the latest discord_messages_reader-X.X.X.nvda-addon file from the Releases page.
2. Open the file. NVDA will prompt you to install it.
3. Restart NVDA when prompted.
4. Open Discord. The add-on activates automatically.

Usage

No configuration is required. Once installed:

• Open a Discord channel or direct message conversation.
• Incoming messages are announced automatically as they arrive.
• Announcements only happen when Discord is the active (foreground) window.
• Typing indicators and status changes are filtered out silently.

Keyboard Shortcuts

• NVDA+Ctrl+Shift+D: Toggle automatic announcements on or off.
• Alt+1: Read the most recent message.
• Alt+2 through Alt+9: Read the 2nd through 9th most recent message.
• Alt+0: Read the 10th most recent message.

All gestures appear under Discord Messages Reader in NVDA's Input Gestures dialog and can be rebound there.

Known Limitations

• Messages are announced up to 500 milliseconds after they appear in Discord's UI, which is the polling interval.
• The add-on reads the most recently visible message. If several messages arrive in rapid succession during a polling gap, only the last one is announced.
• Automatic announcements only occur when Discord is the foreground application. Use Alt+1 through Alt+0 to catch up on messages received while Discord was in the background.

Supported Discord Builds

• Discord.exe (stable)
• DiscordPTB.exe (public test build)
• DiscordCanary.exe (canary)

Building From Source

Requires Python 3.14 and uv.

git clone https://github.com/blindndangerous/discord-messages-reader.git
cd discord-messages-reader
uv sync --all-extras
uv run python build.py

The distributable add-on file is written to dist/.

Running Tests

uv sync --all-extras
uv run pytest

License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

Authors

• blindndangerous - concept, requirements, and testing
• Claude Sonnet (Anthropic) - implementation and architecture
• Codex (OpenAI) - maintenance fixes and test updates