GNOME 3590 Published by

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.



The Orca 2.17.x series are designated for the GNOME 2.17.x releases, but should also work well on the GNOME 2.16.x releases.

NOTE ON FIREFOX 3.0 SUPPORT: we know many of you are anxiously awaiting compelling access to the web via Orca and Firefox. As of v2.17.90, the support is still under development and both the Orca and Firefox teams are working feverishly to get it there for Firefox 3.0.

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* What's changed for Orca v2.17.90?
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* Much more work on the Gecko script (to support both Firefox and Thunderbird). Please note that this is still a work in progress and much more work needs to be done both inside Orca and insideFirefox and Thunderbird. We're working very very hard. Our focusis Firefox 3.0.

* More work on the Thunderbird script to accommodate some unique aspects of the Thunderbird UI. We've also logged several bugs with the Thunderbird folks to help address these things.

* Fix for bug 376791: Orca now provides better access to the buddy list in Gaim 2.0.0 beta 5.

* Fix for bug 397797: Orca now exposes the language attribute of a speech synthesizer voice to allow people to more easily disambiguate voice names.

* Fix for bug 394397: Orca now handles arrowing to the end of a line better and prevents the line from being spoken again.

* Fix for bug 392939: "-" is now spoken spoken when used as a negative sign at "some" punctuation.

* Fix for bug 395749: make sure we reference any_data values when we get an event rather than waiting to work with them asynchronously.

* Added new 'attributes' field to the Python Accessible class defined in at-spi.py. This allows scripts to more easily access the attributes of an AT-SPI object.

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

ar Arabic Djihed Afifi and Mohamed Magdy
bg Bulgarian Alexander Shopov
de German Hendrik Richter
en_GB English/British David Lodge
mk Macedonian Jovan Naumovski
sv Swedish Daniel Nylander

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* Where can I get it?
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You can obtain Orca v2.17.90 in source code form at the following URL:

http://download.gnome.org/sources/orca/2.17/orca-2.17.90.tar.gz
http://download.gnome.org/sources/orca/2.17/orca-2.17.90.tar.bz2

>From the Sun Microsystems, Inc., Accessibility Program Office,

Willie Walker, Project Lead
Mike Pedersen, User Interface Design
Rich Burridge, Core Development and Scripting
Lynn Monsanto, Core Development and Java Platform Support
Michele Budris, Program Management