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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 contributions from wonderful community members.



You can also read more about Orca at http://live.gnome.org/Orca.

NOTE ON FIREFOX 3.0 SUPPORT: we know many of you are anxiously awaiting compelling access to the web via Orca and Firefox. We're making steady progress on this front, both in Orca and with the Firefox team. We're getting there step by step, and we're receiving positive comments from people who are having good success with where we are today. We'll keep going -- join us on the Orca list and share your comments, suggestions, and questions.

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* What's changed for Orca v2.19.1?
=================================

Lots! We constantly listen to what are users are saying on the Orca mailing list and we also took notes on what people had to say at the CSUN conference. We're still working hard and fast. For those who have not joined yet, please join us on the Orca mailing list and we'll listen to you, too. :-):

* Turn on Orca's caret navigation mode by default for Firefox.
NOTE TO USERS: you can still toggle between Orca's caret navigation
mode and Firefox's (i.e., Gecko) navigation mode by pressing
Insert+F12.

* Much work on bug 400716 and 426360 (Firefox) to provide "say all"
support by sentences.

* Fix for bug 430278 to improve the "where am I" functionality. This
also includes bug 427481 to fix the "where am I" feature of the
Evolution Mail...Tasks toggle buttons. This also is related to
the fix for bug 423011 to finish the refactor of where_am_I module
to have knowledge of the script it is working with.

* Fix for bug 426336 to refactor the find{Next,Previous}Role methods
in Gecko.py for Firefox. In addition, list navigation (L and
Shift+L) is now restricted to ordered/unordered lists. Before, form
field lists were included because they, too, have a role of
ROLE_LIST.

* Fix for bug 426684 to speak the entry text in Firefox when the caret
is at the end of the line.

* Fix for bug 427722 to prevent web page navigation from getting stuck
on separators.

* Work on bug 411261 to prevent Orca from saying just "Link" when
arrowing up and down by line in some web content in Firefox.

* Fix for bug 426687 to only speak the entry text when arrowing up and
down in a text entry field in Firefox.

* Fix for bug 413990 to provide more smarts in Orca to detect tables
that are used for layout only purposes.

* Fix for bug 414926 to present level of headings in Firefox.

* Fix for bug 423198 to prevent Orca from speaking "text" repeatedly
when moving around in a text entry area on a web page in Firefox.

* Fix for bug 416971 to speak and braille numbers and bullets of
list items.

* Fix for bug 432674 to respect key echo settings and say "star" when
speaking characters inserted into password entry fields.

* Fix for bug 398009 to present the tooltip text for an object.
NOTE TO USERS: the standard toolkit method for bringing up a tooltip
is Ctrl+F1 when the object has focus.

* Fix for bug 368626 to prevent gnome-panel from crashing when it
pops up a tooltip.

* Fix for bug 423849 to reduce the chattiness of speech context.

* Fix for bug 427880 to restore metacity behavior of presenting the
name of the window to get focus when you're doing an Alt+Tab.

* Fix for bug 413109 to add combobox and slider mnemonics to the
Orca preferences dialog.

* Fix for bug 425498 to provide option to allow user to quit Orca
without needing to go through the "quit" confirmation dialog.

* Fix for bug 413109 to address HIG violations. Thanks to Calum
Benson for his work here.

* Fix bug 423738 to use gconf module methods instead of using exec.

* Work on bug 422487 to move the caret the first line of a message in
in Evolution. There are still issues with HTML messages, which may
require changes in Evolution itself. We're tracking this with the
Evolution RFE: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=423395.

* Workaround for Evolution bug 347964 to provide better user feedback
when deleting messages in Evolution.

* Fix for bug 418147 to make sure we treat characters in strings as
characters and not as bytes when spelling an item.

* Fix for bug 430434 to make the key echo settings be enabled by
default.

* Fix for bug 430726 to implement GNOME GOAL #4.

* Updated orca man page.

* Updated the user experience specifications.

* New and updated translations (THANKS EVERYONE!!!):

NOTE TO TRANSLATORS: we have finished our first major pass on bug
412200 to address I18N/L10N issues. We are now ready for you to
take a look and give us feedback. Please be vocal, and please
let us know where we can improve. We want to make your lives
pleasant.

ar Arabic Djihed Afifi
en_GB English/British David Lodge
es Spanish Francisco Javier Dorado Martinez and
Jorge Gonzalez
sv Swedish Daniel Nylander

====================
* Where can I get it?
====================

You can obtain Orca v2.19.1 in source code form at the following:

http://download.gnome.org/sources/orca/2.19/orca-2.19.1.tar.gz
http://download.gnome.org/sources/orca/2.19/orca-2.19.1.tar.bz2

Enjoy!

The Orca Team