news 28 Posted February 18, 2009 =============== * What is Orca? =============== Orca is a free, open source, flexible, and extensible screen reader that provides access to the graphical desktop via user-customizable combinations of speech, braille, and/or magnification. Orca development has been led by the Sun Microsystems, Inc., Accessibility Program Office via continued engagement with its end users and generous contributions from the Mozilla Foundation and wonderful community members. You can also read more about Orca at http://live.gnome.org/Orca. ================================== * What's changed for Orca v2.24.4? ================================== The Orca v2.24.4 release is a maintenance/bugfix release for GNOME v2.24. It contains important fixes for hangs, usability issues, and handling of ARIA-enabled web content. 2.24.4 - 18-Feb-2008 General: * Fix for bug #553678 - orca can act badly at login time. This was a bad one where pressing Ctrl+s to invoked Orca in speech mode after pressing Ctrl+m to invoke Orca with the magnifier would cause the magnifier to freeze in one spot. * Fix for bug #561548 - Orca locks up when closing some Pidgin conversations. Also helps with bug #567864. This was a very bad hang that several people reported on the Orca list. * Fix for bug #568589 - braillegenerator adding image string versus braille.Component for table cells. This was exposed after the OpenSolaris packagemanager made changes to add accessible names for images in the package list. Prior to the fix for bug #568589, Orca would go silent in the revised packagemanager list. * Fix for bug #568751 - Interaction with the punctuation preferences can cause a hang. This was another bad hang reported on the Orca list. * Fix for bug #568875 - Pressing "Apply" button in preferences dialog causes autostart option to be checked. This caused some users much confusion. * Fix for bug #569343 - Speaking of indentation is misleading. Users deemed this to be misleading enough that they wanted this fixed for 2.24.4 (i.e., they didn't want to wait for 2.26.0). * Part of fix for bug #570387 - Clean up the speech tab of the preferences UI. This causes Page Up and Page Down to work on the hscales. Before this, only the arrow keys worked, which could require users to arrow 1 unit at a time across a 100 unit scale. * Fix for bug #572294 - Need a sanity check in the default script's locusOfFocusChanged. This would cause Thunderbird to go quiet and also cause Orca to consume normal typing keys that it should not consume. Evolution: * Fix for bug #567428 -"readonly text" spoken when caret changes line. This was a big usability issue. * Fix for bug #570390 - Spellcheck in evolution is badly broken. Firefox/Thunderbird: * Fix for bug #537303 - Certain FF3 add-ons interfere with Orca's ability to provide access to content. * Fix for bug #567864 - Orca stops responding when flat review is used in thunderbird message window and message is closed. This was a very bad hang reported by several users on the Orca list. * Fix for bug #567984 - Structural navigation needs to consider text within the document frame. * Fix for bug #568631 - Orca does not update the position for same-page links which reference objects by name/id in Firefox 3. * Fix for bug #568768 - Orca starts at the top of a newly-loaded page rather than the specified fragment. This was a very bad usability problem when navigating across web pages. * Fix for bug #552965 - (ARIA) aria-valuetext ignored * Fix for bug #555540 - (ARIA) Add support for additional landmark roles. * Fix for bug #568467 - (ARIA) aria-describedby text spoken twice via Where Am I * Fix for bug #568550 - (ARIA) Add default keybindings for navigating by landmarks * Fix for bug #569346 - (ARIA) No speech for image-only ARIA buttons and ARIA menu items * Fix for bug #569835 - (ARIA) Orca should support the ARIA haspopup attribute * Fix for bug #570551 - (ARIA) UIUC Number Guessing Game Alert Dialog not presented when it appears. * Fix for bug #570524 - (ARIA) Issues with Dojo combo box interaction. * Fix for bug #570532 - (ARIA) Alert text not brailled when navigating it. * Work on bug #571058 - (ARIA) Orca's caret navigation is kicking in when it shouldn't be. ===================== * Where can I get it? ===================== You can obtain Orca v2.24.4 in source code form at the following: http://download.gnome.org/sources/orca/2.24/orca-2.24.4.tar.gz http://download.gnome.org/sources/orca/2.24/orca-2.24.4.tar.bz2 Enjoy! The Orca Team _______________________________________________ Share this post Link to post
